(still) geeking out in the UK

Have I mentioned this city seems to inspire me at every turn?

I'm really, really sorry if I'm boring you with my London updates. Quickly, on books:

Cassandra and Jane is really good if you happen to be an Austen fan. Say, if you spent a portion of your Saturday afternoon at the London Literature Festival listening to how difficult and wonderful it is to work with Austen's texts to make movies and other books.

Okay, well maybe you don't have to be that big a fan.

But you should probably like Austen and be sort of familiar with her history (may I suggest Carol Shields' brief biography?). Because for all that Jill Pitkeathley is clearly riffing her own take on Austen and the relationship she shared with her sister, her take isn't really all that different from the official history. Which is kind of a surprise if you take a skim through other books on offer from Harper's historical fiction titles:

Revenge of the Rose -- "In a court of the Holy Roman Emperor, not even a knight is safe from gossip, schemes, and secrets."

The Fool's Tale -- "Travel back to Wales, 1198, a time of treachery, political unrest...and passion."

The Scroll of Seduction -- "A dual narrative of love, obsession madness, and betrayal surrounding one of history's most controversial monarchs, Juana the Mad."

See? So it's kind of shocking how tame Cassandra and Jane is. However, given the depth of love so many fans have of their Jane, Pitkeathley probably played it pretty close to facts for her own safety. Rather than a love story that would throw question on whether Miss Austen did in fact die a virgin, Pitkeathley opts to tell a tale of sisterly love in a first-person narrative from Cassandra's point of view.

My other travel companion in the last couple weeks has been Novel Destinations, a birthday gift from a dear friend. I can't possibly get to even half the places the book notes in London and England alone, but it's really just the start of a life journey.

Bought? Well, so far I've been really good about keeping my wallet in my purse.... Knowledge the pound continues to outstrip the Canadian dollar by nearly 2:1 helps. But I couldn't resist Let's Call the Whole Thing Off, an inspired collection of break-up tales I found at the South Bank Book Market that's perfect for reading before I go to sleep after I've toiled through hours of studying....

Yes. Yes I am supposed to be toiling right now.

But quickly: The London Literature Festival. My new favourite thing. Even though it wasn't exactly packed with people on the weekend. And the Austen industry talk featured at least two women sitting in the front row who gasped, giggled and sighed whenever they agreed with or were shocked by presenters' words. They were particularly agog by the idea someone might mash up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. (Which, by the way, has now been published in 22 languages and 37 countries, leading to a spike, too, in sales of the original book. Still, harrumph on principle.)

A Wuthering Heights seminar saw more people in attendance, but mostly because there is a new British mini-series expected out in the fall, and members of the press were invited out to see clips of the film and hear from the screenplay writer.

What was so interesting, to me, was how writers can work towards taking apart the original manuscripts and rebuilding them. Wuthering Heights, particularly, presents a problem because of the style of narrative, the two characters who tell the story but aren't really part of it. The screenwriter said he literally had three copies of the book, one of which he took a knife to in order to break apart the story and reorganize chronologically in order to navigate the tale.

Not initially a fan of Wuthering Heights -- I still think it presents a hero only infatuated teenage girls could truly love -- the evening discussion had me reconsidering. I never thought of Cathy and Heathcliff's children as the rays of hope, as the real hero and heroine of the novel....

I do wonder about the idea every generation needs its own Pride and Prejudice, or its own Wuthering Heights. Perhaps this is the line of thinking born of having a broadcast community almost wholly funded by the government?

Meanwhile, I should really get my hands on an old text to manipulate and reform as my own....

(Yes, Gurinder Chadha was at the lit fest -- she seemed really cool! And apparently she's sort of kind of maybe trying to work out a way for Bride and Prejudice to become a stage production....)

Sucks/Doesn't Suck

Things that, frankly, suck:

• Moving
• Switching cable service from one floor to another (necessitating three weeks without Internet at home, leading to me sitting in a downtown café that has a high creep-factor, as a boy-child wearing a pink dress leans over my shoulder to look at my computer, while I review two-week-old Facebook messages that no longer make any sense and marvel at how Facebook had taken my life hostage and I think I might quit it altogether -- erm, Facebook, not life, to be clear)
• Mailboxes missing mailbox keys
• A broken iPod -- not related to anything else on this list, but sucky nonetheless.

Anyway, due to circumstances beyond my control -- some of them, at least -- I haven’t blogged in awhile. Which, I think, has been very disappointing for my (sole) readers.

Mom, Dad, Granny.

But I still have thoughts! And some of them are even new!

First, though, to go back to old thoughts that I’m still kind of proud of for their nouveau wannabe feminism -- when I was 18, I thought Elizabeth Bennet and Sophia Western were victims of happy endings, left to sacrifice any sort of individuality or independent thought or word to the men they would marry.

I may have been bluffing.

However, having just seen Becoming Jane, I’m contemplating the idea of victims or victors within happy endings.

The film -- starring the luminous Anne Hathaway and the blistering James McAvoy -- makes its heroine something of a victim of circumstance and love and destiny.

Which makes me think, really, that sometimes a woman is damned regardless.

Does Austen’s work really tell us she was unhappy with her lot in life? (Perhaps Persuasion does.)

For that matter, should we assume Emily Bronte or Lucy Maud Montgomery or Emily Dickinson or any other literary woman who died alone was unhappy?

(Or that they died alone? Most had nieces or nephews or brothers who later guarded their reputations rather well.)

Were the happy endings they put on the page representative of their dreams? Their wishes? Or an illustration of their own high standards? If these women could not have the perfection or passion of a Mr. Darcy, then did they simply not see the point of bothering at all?

I hate to put a 21st century spin on women I didn’t know, whose morals and needs likely couldn’t be less similar to my own.

But I wonder. Why think of any of these women -- authors or characters -- as victims when, perhaps, they simply made the best choices they could for themselves.

To make a film about Austen’s love life is to assume she wrote about herself in her books, developing her own sense of character through her heroines. It is also to assume she had a love life at all, and that the only way to write a love or a believable romance is to have tasted it herself. And to have somehow fallen short, left wanting forever.

On this, I can’t help but turn to an Austen biography written by Carol Shields.

“She was snatched from the good novel she had imagined herself into and placed into an alternate narrative of class bitterness…. The hero, it turned out, was part of a pragmatic design. For Jane Austen’s Tom Lefroy was gone, swiftly removed by the Lefroy family, who had greater plans for this young man than marriage to an unmoneyed clergyman’s daughter….
She never saw him again, although it is clear she thought of him. It is also apparent that the episode multiplied itself again and again in her novels, embedded in the theme of thwarted love and loss of nerve. In the novels, happily, there is often a second or third chance, a triumphant overriding of class difference but between Jane Austen and Tom Lefroy there is only silence. He returned to Ireland after his studies, married an heiress, produced a large family, became something of a pious bore, and eventually rose to become chief justice of Ireland.” (p. 50-51)

Bleh.

He also, apparently, named his oldest daughter Jane. Which, if they ever did do more than hold hands at a country ball, is icky. I do not believe I would smile courageously, lifting my chin and staring off into the near-distance for a moment, if I found out my ex had named his eldest child after me.

I think I’d more likely throw up a little in my mouth.

Speaking of throw-up, I have a single entry on the not-suck list.

• Two of my best friends, high school sweethearts since high school, welcomed their baby daughter to the world last week. A baby girl who will never ever lack for love from all the people around her and who, I am sure, will never be a victim of a happy ending but rather a victor.