Friday Bookblogging: Time Travelers Edition
Welcome to another edition of Friday Bookblogging!
Just in time for summer vacations, a new spate of Jane Austen-related books is hitting the shelves. Alexandra Potter talks about the inspiration behind her new book, Me and Mr. Darcy.
Alexandra Potter got the idea for her new novel when she read a poll in a magazine asking women to name the man they most wanted to date.
It wasn’t Brad Pitt.
It wasn’t George Clooney.
And it wasn’t Johnny Depp.
It was Mr. Darcy. The fictional Mr. Darcy from Jane Austen’s classic, Pride and Prejudice.
“How insane is that? He’s not even real,” Patter said with a laugh. “So I thought it would be a good idea to write a book about what it would be like for a modern woman to really date Mr. Darcy.”
Well, if nobody else wants George Clooney, we’ll take him. *waggles eyebrows* Have fun with Mr. Tolerable-I-Suppose McMoodypants.
An AustenBlog favorite hits the shelves next week, Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine’s Guide to Life and Love by Patrice Hannon, republished by Plume, meaning it will be more widely available (and deservedly so in our opinion). The book is a sort of self-help guide as Jane Austen herself might have written. We’ll be giving away a copy of this book next week, so stay tuned!
A new paperback edition of Becoming Jane Austen by Jon Spence is now available for those who are curious about the book that inspired the upcoming film Becoming Jane. See the AustenBlog review. A film tie-in book of Jane Austen quotations, Becoming Jane: The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen, is also available.
We also heard about two new books from Sourcebooks. The first is Old Friends and New Fancies, a reprint of a sequel first published in 1914. From the publisher’s press release:
Unlike other sequels, which focus on just one Austen classic, Brinton’s novel impressively intertwines the lives of the most beloved characters from all six. Making use of references made to the characters by Jane Austen herself, documented in her nephew’s memoir, Brinton brings together all the characters left standing at the end of the novels—particularly the unmarried ones—for an inventive and entertaining story of matchmaking.
The second book is another republication, Letters from Pemberley by Jane Dawkins, which many Janeites will remember was first published about a while back, but will now be more widely available. From the publisher’s press release:
Rather than a sequel, this book more closely resembles an old-fashioned patchwork quilt, combining Austen’s ideas, language and historical context with Dawkins’s original story. Dawkins caringly gives Austen her due, incorporating a line or a phrase or a sentence from one of Jane Austen’s books or letters into every piece of her tale about Elizabeth Bennet’s first eventful year at Pemberley.
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Fitzwilliam Darcy dating modern women? I don’t think so! this could be amusing in concept but “modern women” could not live in the Regency Period without modern conviences-or-as in Emma Thompsons Sense and Sensability-getting everything wrong about the horses and carriages-including women not being dropped off kerb side so the camera can show ‘em jumping over piles of horse droppings so as to be amusing…..perhaps Thompson needs to study the time period more throughly before writting again.Best modern author to study everything he was writting about was Patrick O’Brian.
Perhaps darcy might be amused by the book, “Jane Austen’s guide to Dating”?
James–actually I liked that book a lot. It’s better than you might think.
Mr. Tolerable-I-Suppose McMoodypants
heheheeee