What Jane Saw

What Jane Saw is an online exhibition that reconstructs, meticulously, like engineers would, the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, as they would have been displayed in an art gallery in Pall Mall on May 24, 1813.

Jane Austen, basking in the success of her stupendously bestselling novel, Pride and Prejudice, visited the gallery, not simply to gawk at the paintings themselves, but also to do some celebrity-spotting.

Austen was an avid celebrity-spotter and would be quite at home today in the celebrity-obsessed TMZ culture.

The online gallery celebrates the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice and is a superb progeny of the marriage between the humanities and technology. As the NYT says of the gallery that used the 3-D modeling software SketchUp, to reproduce paintings based on precise measurements recorded in an 1860 book: 

If the notion of a Wii-ready Austen offends purists, others may be happy to see 21st-century technology harnessed in the service of the Divine Miss Jane.

Recently, scholars like Janine Barchas, Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, and conceiver of the project, have re-introduced Jane Austen as a history-minded, worldly woman, who isn't quite the country mouse writer preoccupied with revealing timeless truths.  

Pride and distraction

If Lizzie Bennet were alive today, her greatest fear would be not an accidental pregnancy but an overly eager suitor who might distract her from writing her novel. In fact, it's the men who have a harder time bouncing back from the hookup culture, as Michael Kimmel chronicles in his book Guyland.

Hanna Rosin's view on how a 21st century Elizabeth Bennet, one of Jane Austen's fiercely feminist heroine, would view the advances of male suitors.

I wonder about the 21st century Darcy...

Post-Pride and Prejudice

British novelist P.D. James has penned her 21st novel at age 91.

Death Comes to Pemberley--Darcy's abode in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice--draws the characters from Austen's classic and involves them in a tale of murder and emotional mayhem.

The story is set in 1803, six years after Pride and Prejudice was finished (though it wasn’t published until 1813) and presumably when the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy took place. They have two young sons now, and the arrival of a third child is shortly to be announced. But their tranquillity is interrupted one wet and windy evening when an unexpected carriage comes rocketing up the drive.

The style of Death Comes to Pemberley is a loose approximation of 19th-century prose, a sort of modern equivalent, rather than a painstaking imitation. But it’s more than convincing and every now and then, as a kind of homage or reminder, hits the precise, epigrammatic Austen note.

Courtesy The NY Times