Authors Electric

The servants' view:  Longbourn by Jo Baker Look, I don’t usually bother with this sort of thing.  Yet another rewriting of Pride and Prejudice . We’ve had it from the servants’ point of view (Jo Baker’s Longbourn ), it’s infused Bridget Jones’s Diary , and been recast as a comic horror film,  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,  starring the Undead. (This last version may be a kind of backhanded compliment to Jane Austen on the deathless status of her most loved work, I couldn’t possibly say.)  And now, heaven help us, we have Mary Bennet’s story.  Suffused with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice : Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding That’s right. The hilariously tedious, pedantic, verbose, two-dimensional middle sister whose only function is for us to laugh at her. Whether or not you find her a believable character, or feel there’s a touch of cruelty in her creation, there's no escaping the fact that this is how Jane Austen wrote her.  But guess what....

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. It is the 250th anniversary of the birth of one of my favourite authors, Jane Austen, later this year (16th December to be precise). I’m fortunate enough to be able to easily get to Winchester Cathedral where she is buried and they have had exhibitions celebrating her life and work.   Indeed there is an exhibition running there from 23rd May until 19th October 2025 called the Jane Austen Poetry Exhibition which looks at the friendship between her and Anne Lefoy, who was a mentor to Jane. (I find it encouraging mentors are nothing new for writers). Jane wrote a poem regarding the death of her friend and that poem is one of the objects on display here. I discovered the joy of Austen’s work, especially Pride and Prejudice, thanks to it being one of the books I had to read at secondary school. I would say its impact was to show me irony was a thing in fiction.  I’ve had good cause to appreciate that since...

Earlier this month, one of the earliest known books in existence was sold at auction by Christie's for more than £3m... yes, you read that right... THREE MILLION pounds! That's enough to buy a big house with a few acres in the UK. part of the Crosby-Schoyen codex The Crosby-Schoyen Codex  contains the first epistle of Peter and the Book of Jonah, making it the earliest known surviving Christian book (approx 300AD). It was written by hand in Coptic on papyrus, has 104 pages, and apparently took a single scribe 40 years to complete. Fortunately, the scribe lived in an Egyptian monastery at the time so was not trying to juggle a day job and kids as well. First editions of popular books in good condition might also buy you a house (if a slightly smaller one). First edition hardcovers of JK Rowling's debut title Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone are currently listed online for six figures (£100,000+), while first paperback editions of the same title are fetching five-...

National Portrait Museum I was a teenager when I first read Jane Austen. But how much funnier the books are when seen from an adult perspective, and how different they all are. Born in 1775, Austen is a product of her times although not blind to the inequalities in society. Although from a relatively modest background, Jane’s own brother was adopted by a wealthy childless family, which made her an acute observer of the advantages conferred by money and breeding. In those days, heroines were traditionally faultless wimps without wit; in Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennet breaks the mould and is the most modern in outlook. One of five daughters, the family home will be inherited by a male cousin, leaving the girls in a difficult position. Jane Austen was very objective about the position of women, and how important it was to marry well or, in fact, at all. So, taking a cursory look at the books one by one and focusing on the central female characters we get a good idea of a fairly wid...

I have fellow Electric Author Allison Symes to thank for my ruminations this month. Her post a couple of weeks ago on her dislike of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park unleashed a lively debate on Jane Austen’s heroines, and why we love some more than others. It struck me then that the fact we can argue about this at all is down to Austen’s genius in creating six romantic heroines, all struggling within the confines of the same social framework, and all so different from each other.    Not what Jane Austen does. Photo by Dmitrii Fursov Ah yes, that social framework. Let’s get one thing out of the way first. I have no time for anyone who holds the extremely-unoriginal-but-frequently-voiced-with-Great-Smugness-by-persons-who-think-they-are-the-first-to-do-so-opinion that Jane Austen is not worth considering because she didn’t set her novels on the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars. That point of view simply cannot grasp that Austen’s greatness lies, not in recounting military cam...

The ideas in this blog were developed for a recent talk at the Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich Northanger Abbey  is a novel with reading at its heart, a coming-of-age novel in which Catherine Morland, the seventeen-year-old heroine, discovers the fallibility of Gothic fiction as her guide to life: Charming as were all Mrs Radcliffe’s works and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. “At least in the midland counties…”   Of the Alps and the Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland and the South of France, might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine did not dare doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. Catherine is reading Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 bestseller The Myste...

Fuelled partly by guilty displeasures... I've been enjoying, and contributing to, a facebook thread of Julie Burchill's about 'guilty displeasures' - we are all familiar with guilty pleasures, but Mark Mason, in his Spectator column , has exposed some of his GDs, things he hates which are supposed to be cool. In his case, strawberries, Ella Fitzgerald, and champagne head the list. This has got me thinking and raging about my own guilty displeasures, such as classical music. Virtually all of it does nothing for me, though I have a liking for early polyphonic choral music such as William Byrd. Classical music makes a nice soundtrack in films playing in the background while you are watching stuff happen. Classical concerts are the worst, watching people do something totally not visually interesting, with no way of alleviating the tedium. I've been assumed to like it many many times because I'm involved in 'the arts' and have caused shockwaves by sayin...