Well, the Jane Austen film festival on PBS is over. What will her legions of fans do now to keep Jane in their lives? Never fear, we feel your pain and we’re here to help. You can start by buying as many versions of the books on DVD that you can: www.amazon.com is the place to start. You might not find every version of every book (I hear there’s a 1970s BBC version of Pride and Prejudice starring Christopher Lee as Darcy that’s never been released) but you will find at least one of each.

What’s next? You will definitely want your very own Jane Austen action figure, available from www.mcphee.com.She comes complete with her own copy of Pride and Prejudice, plus a writing desk and a removable quill pen!

Want more? How about a Jane Austen paper doll? There are lots of them out there.At www.paperdolls.com you can get Jane herself plus books featuring the main characters from all six of her novels. At www.marilee.us/paperdolls3.html you will find the excellent Fashions of the Regency and Pride and Prejudice paper doll sets. If you don’t want to wait for your dolls, at www.janeausten.co.uk, the website of the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England, there is a lovely printable paper doll. Go to the online magazine and click on “Hands On Regency,” then “Hands On Crafts.”

From the Gift Shop at the Austen Centre you can order your own fan and parasol, hatpins and reticules, patterns for period gowns, and cross-stitch kits of Chawton Cottage, an alphabet sampler, and a cross-stitch version of a portrait of Jane done by her sister Cassandra. If you’re a cross-stitcher, you’ll be excited to know that there’s a lovely new sampler called “The Daughters of Longbourn” by The Stitching Parlor, available from your local needlework store.

If crafts aren’t your thing, and you can’t see yourself ever sewing, let alone wearing, a period gown, but you still want to display your sartorial devotion to Jane, try The Republic of Pemberley Shoppe at www.cafepress.com/pemstore. There you’ll find Jane Austen tee shirts, hoodies, mugs, totes, and magnets. You can search by item or book, so if you’d like to see all of the “I (heart) Mr. Darcy” stuff they carry, you can.

Now that you have your “Fickle, very very fickle” tee shirt, what do you do? How about playing a rousing game of Pride and Prejudice: the Board Game, available from www.ashgrovepress.com? Can’t find anyone to play with? (They were probably scared off by your “I prefer to be unsociable & taciturn” tee shirt.) Go back to www.amazon.com and order the Tarot of Jane Austen.

It’s hard not to wonder what Jane herself would have thought of a tarot deck inspired by her books, but if you’d like to start a discussion of that very thing, click over to either the Jane Austen Today blog at www.janitesonthejames.blogspot.com or the AustenBlog at www.austenblog.com. Connect to Janeites all over the world!

Just one last website.We’d heard rumors of a Pride and Prejudice Barbie, and of course we had to check it out (this is our kind of research). We found a website called Crawford Manor, at www.crawfordmanor.com, which features ordinary fashion dolls that have had extraordinary makeovers. Click on “Tyler’s New York Penthouse” and scroll down to find gorgeous “Emma” and “Elizabeth Bennet” dolls. You can’t purchase them—they’ve already been sold—but at least you know what to ask Santa for for Christmas!

Ok, I know I wrote on Wednesday that this post would contain ideas for using books in unusual ways, but PBS is showing Emma on Sunday! I wanted to sneak in another Jane Austen post. Seriously, we found so many books related to Jane Austen that we have probably two more posts planned. I hope you can stand it.

In our last Jane Austen post, we recommended some books by other authors that use Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as a launching pad. Now, here are a number of books that either imagine a continuation to Jane Austen’s other novels or tell the further adventures of her other novels’ characters. Perhaps you’ll find one or two of interest….

Mansfield Revisited, by Joan Aiken. Doubleday, 1985.

The Youngest Miss Ward, by Joan Aiken. St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Eliza’s Daughter, by Joan Aiken. St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Emma Watson: The Watsons Completed, by Joan Aiken. St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Jane Fairfax: Jane Austen’s Emma, Through Another’s Eyes, by Joan Aiken. St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

A Visit to Highbury: Another View of Emma, by Joan Austen-Leigh. St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Mr. Knightley’s Diary, by Amanda Grange. Berkley Trade, 2007.

Finally, Sybil Brinton wrote a novel that involves characters from all of Jane Austen’s novels, called Old Friends and New Fancies. The Greene County Public Library does not own a copy of this book right now, but we should be able to request it for you through the Worldcat interlibrary loan system. Worldcat is a catalog of hundreds of libraries around the country (and the world). Through this system, you can search for an item that GCPL does not own, and request that it be sent to GCPL for you to borrow. It takes two to four weeks for these items to come in, and you may generally borrow them for three weeks, with one renewal period. Fines for overdues are higher than the fines for regular items, but Worldcat is a wonderful way to have access to more items than are available in Greene County.

Ready to try something else related to Jane Austen? We found so many different books and movies about her novels and her life, and we want to share them all with you! Jane was such an interesting lady (as well as being able to write really well) that various authors have written whole novels and series of novel with Miss Austen herself as a character. Most recently in the news is Miramax Films’ movie Becoming Jane starring Anne Hathaway. The library owns several newly released to DVD copies, which you can request.

Next on the list of Jane-as-a-character novels, is the mystery series by Stephanie Barron. Barron writes in the preface to her first book in the series that she has “found” a number of journals written by Jane Austen about her adventures as a detective. Each of the nine books in the series is supposed to be one of these journals. Try the first, Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor.

You may also be interested in one of these others:

Anitpodes Jane by Barbara Kerr Wilson. 1984.

Just Jane: A Novel of Jane Austen’s Life
by Nancy Moser. 2007.

The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen
by Syrie James. 2008.

Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s most beloved book. After you finish watching the miniseries on PBS, you might want to check out other authors’ version or continuations of the famous story. We have a list of at least 37 books that take Pride and Prejudice as a starting point. We won’t list them all here, but if you are interested, stop by the reference desk at the Fairborn Library and ask to see it. Here are a few that the Greene County Public Library owns, why don’t you put one of these on request?

An Assembly Such as This: A Novel of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman, by Pamela Aidan. - This book tells the story of Pride and Prejudice but from the standpoint of Mr. Darcy. So much about him is mysterious, this may help to clear things up. Pamela Aidan has written a trilogy (this is the first) which continue the story of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. The others are Duty and Desire and These Three Remain.

Linda Berdoll picks up where Pride and Prejudice leaves off. This rather spicy rendition shows just how much love exists between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. Not quite to everyone’s taste, this book is definitely not written by Jane Austen! If you enjoy it, though, Berdoll has written another, Darcy & Elizabeth: Nights and Days at Pemberley.

One of the foremost adapters of Austen’s novels is Joan Aiken. In Lady Catherine’s Necklace, Aiken gives us a story about Rosings, Lady Catherine and Lady Catherine’s daughter Anne.

Since the middle of January, PBS has been showing movies based on the novels of Jane Austen on Masterpiece - Sundays at 9pm. The Complete Jane Austen series will continue until April. The Greene County Public Library carries all of Jane’s books, so if you’re inspired to read Persuasion for the first time after seeing the movie or if you want to read Pride & Prejudice again before PBS broadcasts it, stop into the library to check one out. Jane Austen’s books (in the order being shown by PBS) are:

Persuasion (Jan. 13)

Northanger Abbey (Jan. 20)

Mansfield Park (Jan. 27)

Pride and Prejudice (Feb. 10, 17, & 24)

Emma (Mar. 23)

Sense and Sensibility (Mar. 30 & Apr. 6)

We also have the DVDs and VHSs of the movies PBS is showing, so if you missed one (or can’t wait for the next installment of Pride & Prejudice!), you can catch up by borrowing the library’s copy. Click here to see the list of the Jane Austen DVDs the library owns. Here is a link to the VHS editions. You’ll notice the lists don’t just contain the movies being shown on PBS - Jane is so popular a number of different film versions of her novels have been produced. Watch them all and compare the differences!

If you want to know about those beautiful settings in the films, look at the Jane Austen Locations page - it has pictures of the British estates used as scenery as well as their real names. (Just in case you might want to visit someday!)