Never too much Jane Austen

In case you missed the story in The New York Times, we Austen fans are in for the treat of our lives. Well, at least I hope it's close to that.

This celebratory mood stems from a report in the newspaper of record in this country that not only are there at least two more Austen-related feature films coming this year after "Becoming Jane" (which my bestest-of-friends KG and I are planning to see this weekend), but also Masterpiece Theater is going to kick off "an extravagant season" (I'm quoting from the article) titled "The Complete Jane Austen."

Now is that a reason for glee or what?

I must confess to the most incurable addiction to Jane Austen. Not only have I read Pride and Prejudice several times, but I have listened to the audiobook version at least thrice and I just now ordered it out of the library again. That was after listening to Emma on audiobook for the second or third time as well.

I've read and/or listened to every novel Austen published and I've watched (or tried to watch because the 1980 BBC Pride and Prejudice is unwatchable) every adaptation available several times. After the BBC released its A&E 1995 adaptation of the novel, my husband gave me the six-hour videotape collection, which I've watched in its entirety several times (of course, this was all way before the dissertation-writing period began!). And I've now watched the most recent 2005 P&P with Keira Knightley at least three times, too.

Back when I was a young girl, I perfected my accent by watching Masterpiece Theater in our little black-and-white TV in the back room of our house-behind-a-hospital in Puerto Rico. I loved Alistair Cooke's British accent and spent hours trying to imitate it until I got so that I sometimes can sound fairly persuasively English.

The silly part of all this is that since I have a good ear for accents, after listening to Austen on audiobook for hours I often pronounce English with what must sound like a Puerto Rican trying to speak the Queen's English like the Queen herself. Anyone who doesn't know me must think I'm a snob!

And while I'm currently listening and chuckling to E.M. Foster's A Room with a View (another favorite of mine) on audiobook, he's just not the same. Austen's often acerbic wit and her penchant for ridiculing characters, even those she ostensibly sets up as her heroines and heroes, is simply addictive.

Thus, I've concluded that now, more than ever, I must fast-track this darned dissertation.

The Masterpiece Theater extravaganza begins in January and I plan to spend every Sunday watching every single episode (well, that's as long as they adaptations are not utterly disastrous, like the recent absolutely awful PBS adaptation of Dracula, which was so terrible that I could not watch even a few minutes of it).

Oops! On that vein, I gotta get back to my chapter. Indeed!