Katherine Roberts is fed up. As a lecturer specialising un the works of Jane Austen, she has come to realize that the ideal man only exists within the pages of Pride and Prejudice.
Austen fanatic, Robyn Love, is blessed with a name full of romance, but her love life is far from perfect. Stuck in a rut with a bonehead boyfriend, she longs for an escape.
They both head to the annual Jane Austen conference, hoping to cast their troubles away. but, as chaos ensues, it seems and Austen weekend wouldn't be complete without a little intrigue and romance along the way...
A Weekend with Mr Darcy has been released in The UK by Harper Collins and will be out in the States in July 2011.
Celebrate the 200th Anniversary of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Birth
with a Blog Tour on September 29th, 2010
"He shrank from hearing Margaret's very name mentioned; he, while he blamed her--while he was jealous of her--while he renounced her--he loved her sorely, in spite of himself." Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
Elizabeth Gaskell birthday blog tour graphic by Katherine Cox of November’s Autumn
2010 marks the bicentenary of mid-Victorian novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Gaskell’s birth on September 29th, 1810 near London. Best known for her detailed and sensitive portrayals of English social strata, her novels are cherished by literature lovers and social historians for their honest depiction of life of the rich and the poor from the first half of the nineteenth century. Five of her books have also been brought vividly to the screen in television mini-series adaptations: The Brontes of Haworth (1973), Wives and Daughters (1999), North and South (2004), Cranford (2007) and Return to Cranford (2009).
To honor Mrs. Gaskell’s literary achievement, please join me and other fellow Gaskell enthusiasts for a blog tour in celebration of her birthday. Visit any of the participant’s blogs on Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 to read about her life and times, and reviews of books and movie film adaptations. There you will also find a link to take you to the next blog on the tour. Enjoy!
“We want to make the world dance to our tune, that's all.
But the world's got a tune of its own, much older than ours”
The author and his ideas
Reviewers and government censors condemned D.H. Lawrence's last novel as radically pornographic, a vision of a relationship and a society without moral boundaries. But Lady Chatterley's Lover is not really a radical novel, unless it can be said to be radically reactionary, a profoundly conservative response to the modern condition. What was the modern condition that Lawrence found so foul, and who was the author, a paradoxical man whose somewhat puritan mind raged against modernity through an unprecedentedly unconstrained celebration of sexuality?
Lawrence was not the only author writing in the decades after the first World War whose work was considered radically immoral; famously, for instance, a furor arose over the publication of James Joyce's great novel Ulysses years before Lady Chatterley's Lover was written. Many of the modernist writers and poets who dominated postwar avant-garde literary art placed a high premium on discarding social convention, which they believed had been exposed as empty by the carnage of the war. Society was morally bankrupt, empty of real meaning, composed of individuals between whom no real connection or understanding was possible. In response, artists began to experiment radically with form, and they set a premium on art that was "real," that eliminated convention to get at the core of life.
D.H. Lawrence was not really one of these formally and thematically radical modernists. While he shared the modernist belief that the postwar world was virtually bereft of meaningful values, Lawrence laid the blame at the doorstep of technology, the class system, and intellectual life. He believed that modern industry had deprived people of individuality, making them cogs in the industrial machine, a machine driven by greed. And modern intellectual life conspired with social constraint to bleed men dry of their vital, natural vigor. Lawrence wanted to revive in the human consciousness an awareness of savage sensuality, a sensuality which would free men from their dual enslavement to modern industry and intellectual emptiness. He was in many ways a primitivist: he saw little reason for optimism in modern society, and looked nostalgically backwards towards the days of pastoral, agricultural England.
The novel
The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Eastwood in Nottinghamshire where he grew up. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story. Lawrence at one time considered calling the novel Tenderness and made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition. It has been published in three different versions.
Lady Chatterley's Lover begins by introducing Connie Reid, the female protagonist of the novel. She was raised as a cultured bohemian of the upper-middle class, and was introduced to love affairs--intellectual and sexual liaisons--as a teenager. In 1917, at 23, she marries Clifford Chatterley, the scion of an aristocratic line. After a month's honeymoon, he is sent to war, and returns paralyzed from the waist down, impotent.
After the war, Clifford becomes a successful writer, and many intellectuals flock to the Chatterley mansion, Wragby. Connie feels isolated; the vaunted intellectuals prove empty and bloodless, and she resorts to a brief and dissatisfying affair with a visiting playwright, Michaelis. Connie longs for real human contact, and falls into despair, as all men seem scared of true feelings and true passion. There is a growing distance between Connie and Clifford, who has retreated into the meaningless pursuit of success in his writing and in his obsession with coal-mining, and towards whom Connie feels a deep physical aversion. A nurse, Mrs. Bolton, is hired to take care of the handicapped Clifford so that Connie can be more independent, and Clifford falls into a deep dependence on the nurse, his manhood fading into an infantile reliance.
Into the void of Connie's life comes Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on Clifford's estate, newly returned from serving in the army. Mellors is aloof and derisive, and yet Connie feels curiously drawn to him by his innate nobility and grace, his purposeful isolation, his undercurrents of natural sensuality. After several chance meetings in which Mellors keeps her at arm's length, reminding her of the class distance between them, they meet by chance at a hut in the forest, where they have sex. This happens on several occasions, but still Connie feels a distance between them, remaining profoundly separate from him despite their physical closeness.
One day, Connie and Mellors meet by coincidence in the woods, and they have sex on the forest floor. This time, they experience simultaneous satisfaction. This is a revelatory and profoundly moving experience for Connie; she begins to adore Mellors, feeling that they have connected on some deep sensual level. She is proud to believe that she is pregnant with Mellors' child: he is a real, "living" man, as opposed to the emotionally-dead intellectuals and the dehumanized industrial workers. They grow progressively closer, connecting on a primordial physical level, as woman and man rather than as two minds or intellects.
Connie goes away to Venice for a vacation. While she is gone, Mellors' old wife returns, causing a scandal. Connie returns to find that Mellors has been fired as a result of the negative rumors spread about him by his resentful wife, against whom he has initiated divorce proceedings. Connie admits to Clifford that she is pregnant with Mellors' baby, but Clifford refuses to give her a divorce. The novel ends with Mellors working on a farm, waiting for his divorce, and Connie living with her sister, also waiting: the hope exists that, in the end, they will be together.
Analysis
Well, it is important to remember not only precisely what this novel seems to advocate, but also the purpose of that advocacy. Lady Chatterley's Lover is not propaganda for sexual license and free love. As D.H. Lawrence himself made clear in his essay "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover," he was no advocate of sex or profanity for their own sake. The reader should note that the ultimate goal of the novel's protagonists, Mellors and Connie, is a quite conventional marriage, and a sex life in which it is clear that Mellors is the aggressor and the dominant partner, in which Connie plays the receptive part; all who would argue that Lady Chatterley's Lover is a radical novel would do well to remember the vilification that the novel heaps upon Mellors' first wife, a sexually aggressive woman. Rather than mere sexual radicalism, this novel's chief concern--although it is also concerned, to a far greater extent than most modernist fiction, with the pitfalls of technology and the barriers of class--is with what Lawrence understands to be the inability of the modern self to unite the mind and the body. D.H. Lawrence believed that without a realization of sex and the body, the mind wanders aimlessly in the wasteland of modern industrial technology. An important recognition in Lady Chatterley's Lover is the extent to which the modern relationship between men and women comes to resemble the relationship between men and machines.
This is a novel with high purpose: it points to the degradation of modern civilization--exemplified in the coal-mining industry and the soulless and emasculated Clifford Chatterley--and it suggests an alternative in learning to appreciate sensuality. And it is a novel, one must admit, which does not quite succeed. Certainly, it is hardly the equal of D.H. Lawrence's great novels, Women in Love and The Rainbow. It attempts a profound comment on the decline of civilization, but it fails as a novel when its social goal eclipses its novelistic goals, when the characters become mere allegorical types: Mellors as the Noble Savage, Clifford as the impotent nobleman. And the novel tends also to dip into a kind of breathless incoherence at moments of extreme sensuality or emotional weight. It is not a perfect novel, but it is a novel which has had a profound impact on the way that 20th-century writers have written about sex, and about the deeper relationships of which, thanks in part to Lawrence, sex can no longer be ignored as a crucial element.
BBC Lady Chatterley's Lover (1993)
What many people don't know is that this version was the last of three written by Lawrence and that, in the view of a number of critics - as well as Lawrence's wife, Frieda - it is greatly inferior to the earlier drafts. In fact, the second of these earlier versions was published in 1972 by Heinemann, under the title John Thomas and Lady Jane.
When Ken Russell set out to film Lady Chatterley for the BBC in the summer of 1992, he drew upon all three versions of the novel, deliberately toning down the infamous sex scenes and the language to ensure the program would be shown in a prime-time slot.
There are several differences between the novel and this 1993 adaptation , but it is impossible to say how much it depends on the use of three different written versions and how much from the director's freedom in adapting them for the screen.
The choice for the TV series was to cut down not only the many explicit sexual detaills but also most of the experiences in Connie's life before marriage and also her affair with Michaelis before meeting Mellors, when she was already married with Clifford.
But again I can't say if the many changes are due to the fact that Ken Russel used the 3 different editions of the novel for his script. So, I just and simply warn you that the series is quite different from the book.
The 4-part serialization stars Sean Bean as Mellors, the gamekeeper, and Joely Richardson as Lady Connie Chatterley, with James Wilby as Connie's disabled husband, Clifford.
I read the novel and watched the BBC series as tasks in my DH LAWRENCE CHALLENGE 2010. This challenge is hosted by Traxy at The Squeee. I'm half- way down since I've got a book and a TV movie yet to go: Sons And Lovers.
It was my birthday few days ago. It was doomed to be lonely and sad. I had to work in the morning (teachers' meeting at school) and spend completely alone the rest of the day. Mind you, I hate to celebrate my birthday, especially now that I have to cope with the fact that I'm not ...let's say... 20 anymore! However, the idea of my husband and sons at the seaside and me here at home alone didn't help my already difficult coping with the hard truth!
Mothers are always very attentive, aren't they? Mine insisted for lunch together whatever the time I finished at school was. I said "OK, Mum!" and wasn't alone for lunch. Mum, Dad, Granny (yes! 98 and she was there too), Aunt, Sister, Nieces and Nephew were all there for me! Lovely lunch and after-lunch chat around the table. No blowing on the candles... for practical reasons but the cakes were delicious!
Once I got home in the middle of the afternoon, ready to spend the rest of the day reading, answering the phone and blogging, a phone call changed everything ... My friend Karen's. "I'm coming and fetch you... click!" What does that mean? Very briefly, she was going to face a one-hour's drive after work to fetch me!
Her present ? A lovely dinner with her and another friend of hers, Rome by night, friendship and sympathy, talking and laughing. It was really special. How did I find such a special, generous friend?
See Richard Armitage, actor.
Well... he was only the sparkle... we did the rest.
I didn't feel alone on my birthday also thanks to my many online friends/mates/acquaintances. Wishes, e-cards, nice words, pictures. What do I share with most of them?
See Richard Armitage, actor
Well, also Jane Austen, period drama, love for books and reading.....
Now, I wanted to show you some very special prezzies I got from a talented blogfriend. Do you like them? She said they are only mine! She didn't post them but give me the freedom to share. Aren't they awesome?
We are eagerly waiting for this new film ... The Three Musketeers. Matthew Macfadyen will be Athos with Orlando Bloom (Duke of Buckingham), Logan Lerman (D'Artagnan) , Christopher Waltz (Cardinal Richelieu) and many other popular names in the cast. The film is due for release April 2011.
Ehm... Hello, RA Friday followers! Welcome again to my RA rambling weekly corner. I was just wondering ... how much of Reddie and how much of Blackie is there in me? Well, when I see pictures like the one above or the one below... burning red Reddie grows huge!
So the danger is something like what happens in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: the latter grows and grows inside the first and takes control in the end. No, please! What if I should turn out completely Red! I'd be very dangerous for myself and my dear! Impossible to be trusted, always swooning, awwwwwwwing and daydreaming! Listen, if you realize Reddie is taking too much control, please, warn me!
And now, let's start. Here we go .
Another week of RA, lots of news, new things to listen to, read, and very soon to watch too!
1. Have you watched and , especially listened to SURGERY SCHOOL? It was broadcast on ITV on 6th September. You find two clips on Alicat's site http://www.richardarmitagenet.com/ on this page or on Annette's site http://www.richardarmitageonline.com/HERE . I can't stand blood and usually can't watch surgical operations on TV so I had to quarrel with Reddie who wanted to see those clips! She's still crossed because I refused to watch them! Can anyone tell me if there are very disgusting scenes in those clips? Thanks a lot. Neither Richard's charm could convince me to watch an operation on TV!
2. What I am eagerly waiting for is instead this radio programme due to be broadcast on BBC Radio3, Words and Music: Symphony of a City . The programme includes readings from the works of Swift, Dickens, Wordsworth, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams, and music by Gershwin, Varese, Byrd, Steve Reich and Charles Ives (further details are available on the BBC website's page about the programme). Richard Armitage and Emilia Fox will be the readers. Only one problem: lessons will started next day. I have to be awake and kicking, ready for my first lesson this year on Monday morning 8.10 and the programme will be on Sunday, 22:45. It means 23.45 here in Italy. I know I won't be able to resist and I'll be there till the end ... and exhausted the next day. Reddie? She told me she 'll bear classical music + classic literature just for RA's sake!
3. More than Reddie, what is growing terribly inside me is the anxiety for Lucas North. It was confirmed that episode 1 of Spooks series 9 is Monday 20 September and episode 2 on 27th September on BBC1. If you don't mind spoilers, synopsis of both episodes are on BBC Press Office HERE and HERE. Than we had a new photo from the set with Lucas, his ex flame, Maya and reporter Catriona from Digitalspy. (HERE)
Richard, Catriona and Laila Rouass
Watching Lucas /Richard in that black hooded jumper gave me a fright: something very bad is supposed to happen to someone wearing a black hooded jumper! I was so worried and scared that I posted on twitter about my fears. Guess who tried to calm me down and reassure me? @Lucas_North! He was such a charming gent!
4. You know Richard Armitage managed to make me read and watch something so far from my taste as Chris Ryan's STRIKE BACK, or start listening to audiobooks, or like something I had always hardly been able to bear, Richardson's CLARISSA. What I've just discovered today is another victim of this talent of his : Hilary at Vulpes Libris . Have you read her brilliant review of The Lords of The North read by Richard?
She says: "One of the things I most admire about Richard Armitage is his gift as a physical actor, and strangely enough this comes to good in his reading of the set-piece fights and battles. He’s telling them as if he’s seeing them in his mind’s eye, and marking the movements – the sense of choreography is so strong. That artifice certainly has helped me through the blood and the dismemberment at certain points, and it occurred to me that the best sort of reader for this sort of book has to be an accomplished stage-fighter with the certificates to prove it. ( ... ) I’ve tried here to describe my reactions to this particular interpretation, and how I relate to it as a reader who ordinarily would probably have hurled The Lords of the North at the skirting board by the end of chapter three, but who listened avidly to every word of this reading. It was a completely different experience – I was not reading the book, I was listening to a dramatic performance, an interpretation by an actor with an intelligence and conviction that drew me into this violent and rather repellent world – where nevertheless a civil society was being forged. As a result, I became curious and learnt more about Alfred the Great and his age, the political geography of the British Isles in the time of the Viking invasions. And I am now an audiobook listener, avidly discovering other wonderful voices. A Bernard Cornwell reader? Well, I’ve now read the rest of this sequence, enjoying the voice of this narrator in my head, Sadly, this is the only novel out of the (so far) five that Richard Armitage has read. To me, his voice is that of Uhtred the hero, so I am not seeking out the others".
5. Last but not least, Richard Armitage Wikipedia page has been updated at last! I definitely appreciated the many quotations from Richard's interviews.
Here's an example:
Richard Armitage describes himself as a method actor. "In a way it's slightly lazy because it means you don't have to pretend - you just have to believe. As much as it's possible to be like that I suppose I kind of do step in and out, I'm not one of these people that can't talk to other people because I'm in my character, but I kind of do stay with the character, yeah. He's always there. It's like marinating something - you're sitting in a marinade the whole time." He frequently speaks of being drawn to and developing dualism in his characters. “If I’m offered the role of the hero, I immediately look for the antihero within!...I see everything in terms of an outer skin and an inner skin.” He has also often mentioned creating “character diaries” with entire biographies for the characters he plays. “It was important to me to put in a background for my character that would be useful for the whole journey. A lot of that is secret and no one gets to read that. It’s what is useful to me. If you are playing something long running and a role that has a future [beyond the initial series], it’s almost like you have to plant a garden which you will need to come back to at some point. If you don’t put in early, it can jar with you
Great job! Well done!
5. Finally I want to help my American blogomates to spread the news taking part in their campaign to see North and South on PBS Masterpiece Classics: if any RA / Gaskell/ Period Drama / North & South fan living in the USA reads this post and doesn't know yet , please read this announcement from servetus at ME+RICHARD ARMITAGE. Heathra has designed a wonderful postcard which has to be signed and sent to Rebecca Eaton, Executive Producer of Masterpiece, to promote the screening.
What about North and South on Italian TV , too? It'd be torture to me since I can't bear watching Richard without hearing his real voice. Horrible torture! But , is anybody interested? We could launch an Italian campaign!
Done! It's all for now. See you next week if you are around. Reddie is ready to start. She promised to be brief but she's got a cunning smirk on her face. I'll come back to check in a while. I must really go, now.
Have a wonderful weekend!
Byeeee, Black-Self! I'll be very brief, promised!
Shhhh!!! Gone, at last! " It'd be torture to me since I can't bear watching Richard without hearing his real voice" (*rolls eyes*) Melodramatic! Watching Richard is simply always a great, great pleasure!!! Now, I must be quick. Do you remember which is my favourite pastime other than watching and re-watching, listening and re-listening to Richard's works? Gossiping about Mrs- Prof- Black- Self!
Have you seen how she poses as the only serious one?
Can you believe she went on flirting with ... @Lucas_North on Twitter?
She saw a pic of Lucas wearing a black hooded jumper and started rambling something like:"No! So.. you see... OMG... No I just feared that ... ! " And began to twitter something about that pic and then ... have a look at these exchanges ... ( her nick is SMaryG on twitter)
.... isn't there a scene in which Lucas (???) is chased and has a hooded jumper on? Look at that black zipped jumper@Lucas_North...Isn't it hooded? Dressed down to be chased in the street....I'm so nervous for what is to come! Richard/Lucas: gorgeous in any dressing style!
*Arches one eyebrow...smiles with a nod and sharp intake of breath* well...that would be telling now....*stares* wouldn't it?
*blushes* Perfectly right, forgive me.*blushes++* That black hood evoked such haunting nightmares. I'm so nervous. Oh, Lucas!
*Arches eyebrows* need a cuddle?
Awwww! Could die for it!
*Smiles and walks over very slowly..pulls you into my arms giving you a very strong but gentle cuddle...smiles down at you* better?
Yeah! Like being in heaven, thanks. All those nightmares have vanished. *smiles up in bliss*
*Smiles and kisses your cheek* a pleasure.....*slow smile*
On her tiptoes kisses your cheek back.You've made her day. She will go on with a sweet smile printed on her face all day long.
*Dazzling smile* always happy to make someones day.....
So, you see? Doesn't she sounds like a simpering, silly, little thing? The serious one! I want to chat with a Lucas North , too! Actually , I'd love something more spicy. To meet him in person? To see his tattoos from a very short distance? What about candles and blue blankets? Oooops! She's back! I told you I had to be quick. She's here to check! Better to disappear. Have a super weekend!
My love for costume movies and period drama has brought to me other joys recently. I've finally watched the 2-part adaptation of my favourite Dickens, GREAT EXPECTATIONS and I've happened to watch this relatively recent film, CHERI , on pay-tv.
Michelle Pfeiffer in Cheri
1. CHERI (2009) Set in the luxurious demi-monde of pre-First World War Paris, CHÉRI is the story of the love affair between the beautiful retired courtesan Léa (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Fred, nicknamed Chéri (Rupert Friend, Albert in Young Victoria 2008 and Wickham in Pride and Prejudice 2005), the son of her old colleague and rival, Mme Peloux (Kathy Bates , Misery 1990).
Turning stereotypes upside-down, it is Chéri who wears silk pyjamas and Léa's pearls, and who is the object of gaze. The two believe their relationship is casual until they are separated by Chéri's marriage, with young Edmée (Felicity Jones, Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey 2007) at which point they realize they are in deeply and desperately in love. They spend a miserable nine months apart, at which point Chéri appears at Léa's home. They spend the night together and Léa begins to plan their new life together.
However, when she learns that Chéri had returned for the moral strength to be a husband, she releases him to return home. The final scene shows Chéri leaving Léa's home to walk down the street towards his home. Léa watches him leave, sure that he will turn and come back. When he doesn't, she returns to her vanity table to gaze at herself in the mirror. The narrator cuts in that after many years Chéri will realize that Léa was the only woman he could ever love, but she was too old for him.
2. GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1999) - Two relatively young stars team up with a seasoned cast including Charlotte Rampling and Bernard Hill in this Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd (Hornblower, Titanic) stars as Pip, Dickens' hero who goes from rags to riches under the patronage of a secret benefactor. The term "great expectations" refers to prospects of a fabulous inheritance, communicated to Pip by Jaggers, a coldly calculating attorney, on behalf of an unidentified patron. The event transforms Pip from poor orphan, mistreated by his sister and apprenticed to his blacksmith brother-in-law, into a supercilious gentleman-in-training.
The story ranges from the Kent marshes in Southeast England, where Pip grows up and where he encounters Magwitch, a terrifying escaped convict, to bustling, companionable, Dickensian London. Justine Waddell (The Woman in White, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Wives and Daughters) is Estella, the haughty young woman who beguiles and tantalizes Pip from their tender years into adulthood.
Charlotte Rampling (Farewell My Lovely, The Night Porter) plays Miss Havisham, Estella's deranged guardian, who has hated men ever since her wedding day many years before, when her fiancé failed to show up -- an event she commemorates by living as a recluse in her bridal gown among the decayed ruins of the wedding feast.
Bernard Hill (Titanic) is Magwitch, the convict whom young Pip assists at the start of the story. Dickens fans well know that a desperate character who pops up at the beginning is sure to show up again in a most unexpected context.
Other immortal Dickensian creations spring to life including Molly, Jaggers' brutish housekeeper; Wemmick, Jaggers' dual-personality clerk; Mrs. Joe, Pip's neurotic and abusive sister; Joe, her husband, the mild-mannered blacksmith; Biddy, their unkempt angelic servant; and Herbert Pocket, Pip's loyal and guileless friend.
The bizarre and once-beautiful heiress, Miss Havisham, seems to be behind Pip's unexpected legacy. She has mysterious motives possibly connected with a warped match she envisions between Pip and her ward, Estella, whom Miss Havisham has trained to treat all men with contempt.
Although set in the 1800s, producer David Snodin sees the story as being very contemporary: "We've been diligent about getting it historically correct, but what we accentuate is the modernity of the characters. There are people like this in the world today. There are Miss Havishams -- slightly clinically-insane shut-ins who are in deep need of therapy. There are Estellas. There are Magwitches. There are Pips. There are a lot of Pips -- uncertain young men who don't quite know what their lives are about..."
I posted about GREAT EXPECTATIONS, the novel, some time ago. If you want to have a look ... HERE'S MY OLD POST.
