Jane Austen News - Issue 85
What's the Jane Austen News this week?
"As Spectacular As It Is Surreal" We loved watching this report from Helen Coffey of The Independent newspaper. Helen made the journey from London to Bath especially to take part in the first full day of the Jane Austen Festival on Saturday 9th. Though as you'll see if you watch her video, her journey was nothing compared to the distances which some Jane fans had traveled!
The Internet has been all aflutter this week as images of Colin Firth in his first ever film have resurfaced and spread like wildfire. Ten years before Colin Firth became Mr Darcy he appeared in the film Another Country in 1984. In this historical drama centered around a 1930s British public school and loosely based on the life of the spy Guy Burgess, he played the role of Tommy Judd, Marxist friend of an ambitious, gay public schoolboy Guy Bennett (played by another famous British actor, Rupert Everett). Firth was then but 24 and just out of drama school.




Professor Todd will be discussing patriotism in Austen’s time and her particular attitude to it. her sense of what Englishness is, materially and politically, and how it manifests itself in daily life, what aspects should be a source of both pride and prejudice, her possibly ironic treatment of the characters embodying her apparent attitudes, and how her views change over her lifetime as war gives way to peace.Like all the Gresham lectures it will be open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis, but good news for those who can't make it to London for the lecture is that it will also be live-streaming and available afterwards online. If you'd like to know more and be part of the event their website link is here.
And finally for the Jane Austen News this week, we bring you a lovely performance by actress Rebecca Hare (who has just finished playing the role of Lizzy Bennet on a national stage tour of Pride and Prejudice), reading Jane Austen's poem, When Winchester Races. We hope you enjoy it. A transcript and some background on the poem, which was the last poem Jane wrote before her death, is available here. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf77Kp2WKQE&t=2s[/embed]

3 comments
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Another Country was set in a public school not a prep school, which is for children up to age 13.
Re Noteworthy News – it is not all that difficult to obtain Bank of England notes in Scotland. I see them all the time, though I live in Edinburgh, the second biggest tourist destination in the UK, and I concede it will be less likely if you are somewhere small and remote. But unless visiting where your ancestors came from the average tourist is usually in or in reach of a city, and even if you are headed to a small village half way up a mountain you will have to pass through a city or at the very least an airport. If you don’t get the desired English note in change you can visit a bank. Scottish-based Barclays and HSBCs have Bank of England notes as their default note and the latter puts them in their ATMs. All Bureaux de Change, especially those at airports, are likely to have Bank of England notes available. Getting the £2 coins, once they go on general release, will be another story.