RJA students and visitors: hello!  and welcome!   I hope you’ll soon be using the site yourselves.  I will not be posting much here in the future as it’s your blog, but I’ll read everything you all write and I’ll comment, and I’ll be generally hanging around.

I’ve put together some information about what this course blog is for, and how it’s meant to be used, on the Blog Info pages at the top of the site.  But it also seems like a good idea to start us off with a couple of glances at some interesting Austen-in-popular-culture things I found recently.  One is a news article and the other is a website about a collection of Austen clippings held by a university library.  They’re both examples of the fascination Austen seems to exert (and not just over readers of novels.)

The clippings collection, which now belongs to Goucher College in the USA, is a fascinating thing and  all the scrapbooks have been digitised and put online.  The website says:

The Jane Austen Collection is one of Goucher College’s most significant research collections. The basis of the collection is the 1975 donation of Henry and Alberta Hirschheimer Burke, which included rare Austen editions and related books about Austen’s life and times, as well as personal correspondence and memorabilia related to the Burkes’ interest in Austen and the development of their collection.

Alberta Burke filled ten scrapbooks with press notices and publicity material for stage and screen adaptations of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ in the 40s and 50s, correspondence with various Austen experts (and rare book sellers) in England, and also seemingly with any newspaper or magazine article she came across that mentioned Austen or her books, no matter how slight the mention.  Some of the clippings are interesting and others are not.  But it’s that desire to document everything vaguely Austen-related that is so intriguing.  It’s not something anyone would attempt now, I suspect – dealing with the deluge of information on the internet would be too much.

Lefroy miniature

The news article deals with the miniature portrait pictured here and how it was just about to be sold at auction.  It’s of Tom Lefroy, a man who Jane Austen met, and seems to have got on pretty well with although nothing serious came of it, when they were both in their early twenties.  In the movie ‘Becoming Jane’  they were depicted as in love and when their romance broke off, the movie implied that Jane used Lefroy as the basis for Darcy in ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ There’s no historical basis to this.  It’s just movie stuff.

The assumption that Jane Austen based Darcy on a real person, rather than just made him up, is something I find rather strange.

Which is why it was so interesting that the BBC, which one would expect to be a bit careful about things like this, called the miniature a ‘Mr Darcy portrait’ and seemed generally happy to accept the movie’s fairly over-the-top version of reality.  I guess without the Mr Darcy angle it’s not much of a story.  But I’m sure it didn’t hurt the eventual sale price the painting got when it was auctioned.

By the time the ‘Mr Darcy portrait’ story filtered down to the tabloid gossip website Gawker.com, poor old Tom Lefroy was not only the original of Darcy, he was also the distant ancestor of Mr Big of ‘Sex and the City.’  Which is an awful lot to lay on any man, especially one who’s been dead for 150 years.  I did enjoy the comments left by Gawker readers: “Mrs. Gardiner was right; he looks better after you’ve seen the estate.”