Jane addiction

By CAROLE GOLDBERG

HARTFORD COURANT

Mark Twain was not Jane Austen’s biggest fan.

Twain found her writing tedious, her characters dull and her stories offensively sentimental, complaints he also lobbed at the novels of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper.

Twain once wrote of Austen to a friend: “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

But Austen’s works continue to grace libraries, and though she died at age 41 in 1817, her novels are more popular than ever. The English author’s exquisite comedies of manners are widely cited as the progenitor of today’s popular genre with the inelegant moniker, “chick lit.”

Born in 1775, Austen never married but did enjoy a flirtation with an Irish lawyer and briefly accepted a marriage proposal from another man. She wrote six novels: “Sense and Sensibility,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Mansfield Park,” “Emma,” “Northanger Abbey” and “Persuasion.”

Her Regency-era romances are notable for their early and deft use of irony and dialogue and are solidly underpinned by her sharp observations about women’s prospects at a time when they could not inherit family assets and depended on marriage to stave off poverty.

A film about Austen’s life, “Becoming Jane,” starring Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy, opened Aug. 10, playing up her flirtation with the lawyer, Tom Lefroy.

In September, “The Jane Austen Book Club,” a movie based on Karen Joy Fowler’s 2004 novel about six Californians who meet to discuss Austen and find their lives intertwining in unexpected ways, will be released. It stars Maria Bello, Jimmy Smits, Hugh Dancy, Lynn Redgrave and Kathy Baker.

In January, a PBS “Masterpiece Theater” series will present adaptations of Austen’s six novels, including “Emma” with Kate Beckinsale and the Emmy-winning miniseries “Pride and Prejudice” with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. The four-month series also will include the drama “Miss Austen Regrets,” based on the author’s letters and diaries.

In cyberspace, Austen devotees have connected on Web sites and blogs. Among them are www.austen.com; www.austenblog.com; the discussion group called The Republic of Pemberley at www.pemberley.com; The Jane Austen Society of North America at www.jasna.org; and the Jane Austen home page at www.geocities.com/Athens/8563/.