AUSTEN POWERS

The formidable Jane Austen has, it seems, the ability to reach across the centuries and assist with the complexities of modern relationships. The publisher Hodder has recently acquired - in what is reported to have been a 'fierce' rights auction - a novel in which a freelance journalist, reaching a mid-life crisis and anxious to find a mate, decides to use the Austen novels as guides for so doing. The book will be published in 2012.

It's an interesting approach and one less likely to end in tears, I imagine, than following the romantic template of Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories, it has often been observed, seem to suggest that there is no more desirable woman than a beautiful one who happens to be expiring from an ill-defined malady. I've just been rereading Poe's stories (a choice selection of which is presented in our very own The Dupin Mysteries) and finding them exquisitely well-written and faultlessly timed. Curiously the poetry, which I've also revisited and was anticipating more eagerly, has left me cold.


David

SERIES LITERATURE

I'm currently repairing one of the many holes in my classics knowledge by reading Austen's Emma. Part of the motivation for this choice was that my wife and I had enjoyed a recent television adaptation of same, and I was curious to see how the two versions compared. I found, however, that having the images from the series still reasonably fresh in my mind assisted my enjoyment of the book, in that it mitigated the problem - which I often have with novels of this period - of remembering the identities of and relationships between the characters, and also where they live.

The bonus to having these deficiencies in one's reading history is that one can belatedly discover the elegance and ingenuity of a supreme prose stylist such as Austen. Capuchin Classics' version of Wuthering Heights, which emerges later this year, will be the perfect incentive to re-read another great work that I have only read once. And yes, we did see a recent t.v. series.

David