Showing posts with label Jane Austen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jane Austen. Show all posts

Monday, January 28, 2013

This is so sweet

Lizzie & Darcy on their 200th anniversary. :)




A 200-year-old book and a current web series that make me squee

Pride and Prejudice was published January 28, 1813 and the world has been reading it non-stop ever since. It's one of the few books I have re-read multiple times.

To mark the day, let me point you (once again) to my latest obsession: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. This is a web series which follows a modern-day Lizzie through the (slightly altered) events of P&P. If you want to jump in from the beginning, you can find a handy playlist here (and don't forget Lydia's videos here - of course, Lydia being Lydia stopped adding videos to her playlist some time ago, so you have to just poke around and try to watch them in order).



If you'd like to dig further into the goings-on of the story (many of the characters have their own Twitter, Tumblr & Facebook pages), check out the webpage, which will lay it all out for you (including Lydia's vids in the proper order, folded into the bigger story). The story is set to wrap up in March (after which I plan to go back and re-watch and re-read everything to catch the cues & clues I missed the first time). It's interesting to know more-or-less where the story is going , but to have no idea exactly how this version is going to pull it all off, plus there's the added fun of watching the characters interact outside the videos (for me, this is mostly on Twitter).

Have you been watching? If you haven't, do you think you'll give it a try? What's your favorite adaptation of Pride and Prejudice? (I think this one's up there, but it's not complete yet, so I'll withhold full judgement until it is. I think so far, it has my all-time-favorite Georgiana and possibly the most adorable Mr. Collins ever. Yes, adorable.)

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Watchin' and Sewin': The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

I like to have something on in the background while I work on a sewing project, whether it's a movie or the Doctor Who episodes I'm woefully behind on. Last weekend I decided to try out The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which I've meant to look into for months. I wish I'd done it earlier, because it took a few hours to watch all of these. Thankfully I had quite a bit of sewing to do. The only problem is, I sometimes found myself stopping to watch Lizzie instead of sewing.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries are a modern take on Pride and Prejudice. Lizzie and her friend Charlotte are college students producing Lizzie's video diary as a way to put their studies in film production and mass communication to use. Most of the book's characters find their way into Lizzie's videos, especially her sisters Jane and Lydia (I think this is my favorite portrayal of Lydia I've ever seen). Sadly, Kitty is an actual cat and Mary is now a cousin, but the story doesn't suffer for their relative absence. (For some time with Mary, check out Lydia's short series of videos.) Mr. Bingley is now Bing Lee, and he only has one sister, Caroline (Is it just me, or does Louisa, and therefore also her husband, get dropped out of 90% of the adaptations?). We haven't seen much of Mr. Darcy yet, and nothing of Wickham (though there has been texting!). The idea of Lady Catherine as a venture capitalist is a hoot.

I'll stop going on and on and let you watch.



In preparing this post, I discovered so much more to this story: Lizzie's site has a listing of all the videos with Twitter conversations inserted into their appropriate spots in the timeline. Tumblr is also listed at the top, but none of the random links I clicked showed me Tumblr posts.  Sadly, I haven't had time to work my way through all the links, but that will be a weekend spent in bliss when I do.

This is a really interesting way to tell a story. I'm certainly going to keep following (I think they're only about half way through the events of the book at the moment.)

Friday, December 16, 2011

Happy Birthday, Jane Austen!



I visited Jane Austen's house in Chawton in 1996. The pictures I took there have turned out to be some of the most-viewed in my Flickr stream despite being faded-looking scans. In honor of Jane's birthday, I thought I'd share a slideshow of those photos. Enjoy!

 

Here's a video of the house (including some improvements done a couple years ago). It all makes me want to go back again.


Saturday, October 30, 2010

It's Talk Like Jane Austen Day!

What an amiable and agreeable thing, to speak like our dear Jane today! 


Since it's so close to Halloween, I thought I'd share a video that mashes up the holiday with Jane's work quite nicely:



The book trailer for the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies prequel, Dawn of the Dreadfuls, was perhaps more fitting, but it's not for the squeamish (I have one foot in that camp), so I'll just link to it here for those more stout of heart.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Find of the Day: Jane Austen's Will

The National Archives of the UK recently joined The Commons on Flickr, and today I came across this gem:


I haven't dug very far through their photostream yet, but I already found both a note written by Jack the Ripper and the only surviving letter written by Katherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth wife. It's not just documents; there are plenty of photos. But it's certainly the documents that caught my eye.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Happy Birthday, Jane Austen! (Thanks for the reminder, @cjewel!)


I'm a bad, bad Jane Austen fan and forgot her birthday. Fortunately, Carolyn Jewel remembered and wrote up a nice post with lots of cool links at Risky Regencies.