INTERVIEWS

Selected articles, interviews, and guest posts about CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, RUDE AWAKENINGS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, and SEX AND THE AUSTEN GIRL, the web series inspired by the books:

Wall Street Journal
“Young people, says Ms. Viera Rigler, are deep into Austen’s universe and obsessive fandom ‘is normal to them.’

“‘It’s true,’ she says. ‘We are a little crazy.'”

 
USA Today
“She’s almost eerily contemporary despite the bonnets, the balls and the carriages, because she’s so keen and hilarious an observer of human nature,” says author Laurie Viera Rigler. “To me, it’s as if she’s a modern-day psychotherapist who time-traveled back to the Regency period and writes a novel about everyone who spent time on her couch.”

 
The Times of London
“Laurie Viera Rigler’s Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict leads the field”

 
Futurebook
“Bloomsbury & Babelgum paired up for Sex and the Austen Girl –a new web series to air weekly over 20 webisodes – providing great publicity for the lead up to the publication of Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict...”

 
Library Journal
“Janites will adore the underlying P&P story and romantic comedy tropes, while all readers will enjoy the honest, nitty-gritty details of early 19th-century life.”

 
USA Today
“Laurie Viera Rigler… says fans never tire of new interpretations. ‘Jane Austen wrote just six books, and they want more, more, more.'”

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Authorlink
“I found out that not knowing is the best place for me to be. If you can embrace not knowing in a playful manner wondrous, magical things can happen.”

 
Macleans
“Being a woman, especially a single woman in the contemporary world can be quite confusing,” says Viera Rigler, author of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict. “There are no rules. Who’s supposed to pay? What do sex and dating and monogamy mean? Looking back and putting our own modern nostalgic construction on Jane Austen’s world, the rules were very clear, and I think people long for that.”

 
Stephanie’s Written Word (guest post)
“Though a man may appear to be in love (or pretty close to it) prior to making love, the woman may never hear from him again after the deed is done. In that respect, things have not changed at all since 1813.”

 
San Gabriel Valley Newspapers
How do relationships compare then and now?

“I love the freedom that I have as a woman today, but I think that Jane Austen was also lobbying very heavily for that freedom herself in her books. She was a big advocate in her novels and in her own personal life of marrying for love, but at the same time she was a practical woman and she understood that people have to have something to live on.”

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Wall Street Journal

In Jane Austen 2.0, the Heroines And Heroes Friend Each Other
The Young Seek ‘Sense and Sensibility’ On Dating, ‘Crazy Parents’ Via the Web

By ARDEN DALE And MARY PILON
 

Laurie Viera Rigler has written two Austen-theme novels, “Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict” and “Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict.” In May she launched “Sex and the Austen Girl,” a Web series at babelgum.com that plays on the differences between life today and in the Austen era.

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The two-and-a-half minute webisodes include such titles as “The 200-Year-Old Virgin.”

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Young people, says Ms. Viera Rigler, are deep into Austen’s universe and obsessive fandom “is normal to them.”

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“It’s true,” she says. “We are a little crazy.”

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Write to Arden Dale at arden.dale@dowjones.com and Mary Pilon at mary.pilon@wsj.com

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USA Today

Austen’s power: Jane addiction sweeps theaters, bookstores
By Carol Memmott and Claudia Puig, USA TODAY

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“She’s almost eerily contemporary despite the bonnets, the balls and the carriages, because she’s so keen and hilarious an observer of human nature,” says author Laurie Viera Rigler. “To me, it’s as if she’s a modern-day psychotherapist who time-traveled back to the Regency period and writes a novel about everyone who spent time on her couch.”

Rigler and a growing number of other authors are riding the Austen wave. Rigler’s Confessions of a Jane AustenAddict (Dutton, $24.95), published today, is about an L.A. woman who tries to mend her broken heart by reading Austen.

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The Times of London

Old Friends and New Fancies
By Sybil G. Brinton
Jane Austen fans take to the streets of Bath
Reviewed by Stephen McClarence

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There are interactive novels urging readers to “create your own Jane Austen adventure”, and there’s even the occasional hint of subversive humour. Laurie Viera Rigler’s Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict leads the field here. It centres on a Los Angeles fan “who wakes up in a four-poster bed in Regency England and discovers . . . rampant body odour, sexual and class repression and bloodletting”.

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Futurebook

Send out your dinghies & test the unchartered waters

by Alison Norrington

 

Bloomsbury & Babelgum paired up for Sex and the Austen Girl –a new web series to air weekly over 20 webisodes – providing great publicity for the lead up to the publication of Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict in Feb 2011. Their 20-part Babelgum Original Series “Sex and the Austen Girl” premiered on the broadband network’s comedy channel in May. The webseries is based on the best-selling novels Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict and its parallel story/ sequel, Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict are both published by Dutton & Plume, Penguin Books (USA) and Bloomsbury (UK). The series has its own URL as well as being featured on the comedy shuffle and the front page shuffle of the site. To raise awareness of the series it was tweeted about, with links to Babelgum and the videos were seeded on bloomsbury.com. With Babelgum itself getting 2 million unique users each month this hopes to create an excellent web presence for the series and the books.

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Alison is a novelist & Transmedia PhD student who is currently writing her fifth novel –Loving NY – a transmedia rom com/chick lit that is already media-partnered with Skype and YourTango. She consults to publishers and authors on the strategy behind transmedia publishing.

(www.storycentralDIGITAL.wordpress.com)

Twitter: storycentral

E: alison.norrington@yahoo.co.uk

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Library Journal

The Reader’s Shelf: Lessons Learned: Strong Women Make the Story

Edited by Neal Wyatt

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In Confessions of a Jane Austen ­Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler (Plume: Penguin Group [USA]. 2008. ISBN 9780452289727. pap. $15), Courtney Stone lives a fairly typical life for a 30-year-old single woman in L.A. But after breaking off an engagement, Courtney decides to drown her sorrow in a seemingly innocent evening of pizza and reading Pride and Prejudice. But something goes wrong, and she finds herself in Regency England, surrounded by strangers calling her Jane Mansfield. Attempting to figure out how she took up residence in Jane’s person quickly becomes the least of Courtney’s worries, however. Two men vie for her attention, and she must choose wisely in order to create her own happy ending in this new time. Janites will adore the underlying P&P story and romantic comedy tropes, while all readers will enjoy the honest, nitty-gritty details of early 19th-century life.

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USA Today

Pride and parody: Writers vamp it up with Jane Austen

By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY
 

JaneAustenAddict.com creator Laurie Viera Rigler, author of the popular Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict and the new Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, which incorporate elements of time travel, says fans never tire of new interpretations. “Jane Austen wrote just six books, and they want more, more, more.”

 

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Authorlink

Author’s Obsession with Austen
Yields Successful Novels

By Ellen Birkett Morris

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Laurie Viera Rigler
Rude Awakenings
of a Jane Austen Addict

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Like many women readers Laurie Viera Rigler had a thing for Jane Austen. She parlayed this interest into two novels in which her heroines travel between modern life and Regency England armed with Austen’s novels as a guide.

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Austen’s novels have spawned movies, groups such as the Jane Austen Society of North America, and books ranging from zombie tales to Rigler’s two novels, CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, a national bestseller, and the sequel released this year, RUDE AWAKENING OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT.

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“I was really lucky that I happened to finish the first book at a time when the movie Becoming Jane was coming out and everything Jane Austen was hot again,” observed Rigler.

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What does she think accounts for Austen’s enduring appeal?

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“It is the timelessness of the stories. They combine satire of social hypocrisy and comment on human nature with this great search for love,” said Rigler. “I think of her books as self help books, as my characters do.”

Rigler was standing in her kitchen one day when pictured her protagonist Courtney Stone, a modern woman, waking up in a four poster bed in Regency England.

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Her first book, CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUTEN ADDICT, follows Courtney as she finds herself inhabiting the body and life of Jane Mansfield, the daughter of a gentleman. Courtney’s struggles to adapt to the rigorous standards of behavior and her quest to find love make for a transporting read.

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Her second novel, RUDE AWAKENING OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, chronicles Jane Mansfield’s travels to modern day to navigate a world of puzzling technology and alarming social norms.

Rigler initially thought that she would alternate between the two women’s stories but discovered that their journeys were so different that they needed to be told separately.

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“I wrote Courtney’s story in Regency England first and trusted that I would know how to tell Jane’s story when the time came,” she said.

Rigler’s path to becoming a novelist was not a straight line. She started college at 16 with dreams of becoming a classics professor. She graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from the State University of New York at Buffalo with a B.A. in Classics. Then she worked as an advocate for victims of domestic violence, a legal secretary, and freelance book editor. She worked her way into film work from production coordinating features to producing short films. Two of the short films she produced were commissioned by Showtime. A third short, Blind Curve, was selected for the Cannes Film Festival’s Semaine de la Critique.

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Before writing fiction, Rigler teamed with Richard Roeper of Ebert & Roeper fame to write a humorous, gender-specific guide to movie rentals entitled HE RENTS, SHE RENTS: THE ULTIMATE FILM GUIDE TO THE BEST WOMEN’S FILMS AND GUY MOVIES for St.Martin’s Press. She also coauthored POPPING THE QUESTION: REAL-LIFE STORIES OF MARRIAGE PROPOSALS, FROM THE ROMANTIC TO THE BIZARRE for Walker & Company.

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The first novel took six years to complete. Rigler cited lack of confidence, fear of rejection, procrastination and getting immersed in research as the reasons why.

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“I am a research nerd. I started with Austen’s texts, read books from that period and went to London and Bath to get a feel for it.” She made ample use of the internet, including articles, blogs and information from the Jane Austen Society. She also took lessons in English country dancing.

She described her writing style as “putting together a patchwork quilt.” She completed 10 to12 drafts of the book before she finished it. The second book was finished in two years, building on the research she had done for the first book.

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“I wrote an outline for the first book, but the final product bore little resemblance to the outline. The outline was good because psychologically it gave me something to hang my hat on, but I allowed the story to unfold in its own way.”

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She said that if she gets writer’s block she steps away from the story and asks her character to show her what happens next.

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“I found out that not knowing is the best place for me to be. If you can embrace not knowing in a playful manner wondrous, magical things can happen.”

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Her greatest challenge writing the books was fidelity to the language of Austen’s time period. “Every word became a question,” she noted. Rigler got a subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary online and used Google’s book search to look at books from that period. She created a glossary of terms so that she wouldn’t end up duplicating her research.

Rigler pointed out that Jane in RUDE AWAKENINGS had a “language arc” throughout the book where her word usage changes the longer she stays in the present day.

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Her advice to new writers who are daunted by the prospect of writing an entire novel is to look at it as a series of sentences strung together to create scenes and a series of scenes strung together to create the book.

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“Also, I always kept my theme in mind. The first book was about transformation and the second was about awakening. Reminding myself of this helped me stay focused when a scene was wandering,” she advised.

She was helped along the way by a friend who read every draft of both books and gave her constructive criticism.

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Rigler found her agent by paying attention to which agents were making deals for books like hers and by looking up key words to narrow down a list of agents that might be interested in her work. She wrote a query letter to agent Marly Rusoff of Marly Rusoff Literary Agency, who became her agent.

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She received several offers on the book but went with a two-book deal with Dutton. Trena Keating edited the first book and Erika Imranyi edited the second.

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“It can be disconcerting to get notes from an editor. It can be a knee jerk reaction to get defensive, but editors are so respectful and want to collaborate with you so try to take everything on a case by case basis,” advised Rigler.

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Imranyi advised her to flesh out certain scenes and to enhance some “friendship issues” between certain characters. Rigler enjoyed the collaboration.

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She is sharing her success by teaching writing workshops at Vroman’s, an independent bookstore in Southern California. Topics include keeping a consistent point of view, sensory description, how to write in scene not summary and writing sparkling dialogue.

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Rigler cautioned new writers not to listen to naysayers and not to share their work with everyone, opening themselves to unwarranted criticism.

“A lot of finishing a book is sticking with it and having the vision. I credit what Ron Gottesman, a fellow author and friend, calls the three P’s, persistence, patience and postage,” said Rigler.

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About the Author

Laurie Viera Rigler is the best-selling author of the novels CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT and RUDE AWAKENINGS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, both published in North America by Dutton / Plume. CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT has also been published in the Netherlands (Archipel) and the UK (Bloomsbury), garnering enthusiastic reviews in The Guardian and The Observer and receiving a nomination for a Regency World Award for Best New Fiction.

About Regular Contributor Ellen Birkett Morris

Ellen Birkett Morris is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in national print and online publications including The New York Times. She also writes for a number of literary, regional, trade, and business publications, and she has contributed to six published nonfiction books in the trade press. Ellen is a regular contributor to Authorlink, assigned to interview various New York Times bestselling authors and first-time novelists.

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Macleans

The opposite of sex

Why we’re obsessed with Jane Austen and Regency-era romance

LIANNE GEORGE

Last year, there was no dodging Marie Antoinette. No sooner had Sophia Coppola’s opulent biopic hit the screens than retailers began stocking their shelves with wallpaper, area rugs, wrap dresses, fountain pens and paper plates, all splattered with the ornate symmetry of Versailles.

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This year, we’ve swapped one 18th-century feminine prototype for another, considerably less flamboyant, one. On Aug. 10, Becoming Jane, a film based very liberally on Jane Austen’s early life — starring Anne Hathaway as an implausibly sultry Jane — opens across North America. In the fall, an adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, about six people who meet to discuss Austen’s novels — and find surprising parallels in the plots of their own lives — will hit theatres.

 

Masterpiece Theatre has announced it will air film versions of every Austen novel, in addition to a new drama based on the author’s private letters.

When she’s not appearing on screen, Austen is busily inspiring reams of new fiction. One theme is increasingly ubiquitous: contemporary women who, dissatisfied and over-worked, become obsessed with the cozy world Austen paints. For instance, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, due this fall, is the tale of a modern-day woman “nursing a broken engagement with Jane Austen novels and Absolut” who wakes up one morning to find she is inhabiting the body of an upper-class maiden in Regency England. Similarly, the recently released Austenland, by Shannon Hale, is about a thirtysomething woman who harbours an obsession with Fitzwilliam Darcy (as played by Colin Firth in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice), and acts out her fantasies in an Austen-themed resort.

 

Adding to the mix are Lost in Austen, an “interactive” choose-your-own-adventure in which the reader’s mission is “to marry both prudently and for love” and Margaret C. Sullivans’s The Jane Austen Handbook, which offers Austenophiles “step-by-step instructions to proper comportment” in the author’s time.

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When the first round of Austen-inspired romantic comedies — Clueless and, later, Bridget Jones’s Diary — emerged in the mid-’90s, critics complained that the creators wrongly attributed to Austen a brand of klutzy romanticism. More recently, the journalist Rebecca Traister, writing for Salon about this latest explosion of books and films, suggests modern fans have wildly misinterpreted Austen’s novels as boy-crazy and sentimental. “In the mad dash to find their Darcys,” she writes, “some readers and fans have forgotten that Austen regarded mushy female infatuation as side-splittingly funny … Her heroines are not so much breathless and overcome by their emotions as they are practical and genuine.”

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But it is precisely because Austen is not a romantic that her stories resonate today. She’s a pragmatist, an economist. A stubborn adherence to arbitrary social rules has always been considered the defining characteristic of her work. And these days, when social life is more or less a free-for-all, what could be more appealing?

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In the 19th century, Charlotte Brontë famously rejected Austen’s work as lacking warmth, enthusiasm or anything heartfelt, sniffing, “She ruffles her reader with nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her.” A modern Austen fan might argue there is enough in the world already to disturb a person, if that’s what she wants.

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Austen’s England is the opposite of our messy, confessional culture, where everyone’s lives and loves are posted on Facebook for all to peruse. Her works conjure — rightly or not — some quaint, if unrealistic notion of dignity and restraint. The entire universe of an Austen novel often consists of three or four families in a village, left to sort out their lives between them. There are only so many possible configurations. Emotion figures into it, of course, but it always gives way to rationality, propriety and social norms.

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Which isn’t to say the current fascination with all things Austen is not about romance. But it is a functional, grown-up kind of romance. Courtship in Austen’s day had weight and carried real consequences in a way that it doesn’t today. Readers are well aware of Austen’s mistrust (even horror) of unbridled passion. One misstep and a woman winds up destitute and unloved, a social pariah. Today, by comparison, nothing seems to have weight. Dating, co-habitation, marriage — everything’s undoable. It’s a hard-won freedom that does have its downside.

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“Being a woman, especially a single woman in the contemporary world can be quite confusing,” says Viera Rigler, author of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict. “There are no rules. Who’s supposed to pay? What do sex and dating and monogamy mean? Looking back and putting our own modern nostalgic construction on Jane Austen’s world, the rules were very clear, and I think people long for that.” It’s that yearning for predictability and a social template that draws fans into Austen’s world — a place where two people plus one interaction equals one set outcome. This is also why, among her true devotees, the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, faithful to text, was so beloved and why the dreamy 2005 version starring Keira Knightly was derisively labelled “Brontëfied.”

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Austenmania is likely also another response to the current cultural environment in which femininity and feminism remain at loggerheads. Admirers of Marie Antoinette — a living doll with more exquisite jewels, shoes, and petits fours than any person could reasonably desire — attempted to reclaim coquetry and material binges (raunch culture with money and taste). Through Austen, they express the desire to lose themselves in the cozy confines of 18th-century British propriety, replete with an elaborate set of rules to be corseted by. It is, as author Wendy Shalit called it, the “girls gone mild” phenomenon.

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Of course, no woman in her right mind would actually trade 21st-century life for the Regency era, where women of leisure spent their lives promenading round the shrubbery and torturing the pianoforte (although some days, would that be so bad?). Still, there’s an element of this life that speaks to something many people now long for — something slow. “The pace certainly appeals for good reason,” says Devoney Looser, an Austen scholar and professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. “There is something that just seems very peaceful and calm about the way that these women of leisure live. Most of us don’t have a governess or a scullery maid.”

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Of course, most people back then didn’t have a governess or a scullery maid either. Whether or not we know it, when we fetishize Austen, we’re also fetishizing the freedom to not worry about money matters. In her book Confessions, Rigler’s protagonist, upon finding herself in the boudoir of a Regency-era lady of leisure, muses to herself about the lifestyle: “I can’t begin to count the times I’ve agonized over my chequebook and wished I didn’t have to decide which was more important, paying the electric bill on time or buying groceries, although sometimes I did neither and had my highlights done instead. It’s unlikely that a person with a bedroom like this and a well-stocked jewellery box ever has to prioritize such things.”

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Women in our times may be especially susceptible to this kind of wistfulness. Thankfully — praise Mary Wollstonecroft! — women are no longer reliant on fathers or husbands for income. We can buy our own finery. However, a certain regressive discomfort with personal finance is more common among women than most would care to admit. This is the “white knight” fantasy Liz Perle writes about in her book Money: A Memoir, for which she interviewed hundreds of women about their most shameful secret fantasies pertaining to love and cash — the most common being the wish that someone or something will come along and just take care of it. “Insistent feminist that I was (and remain),” she writes, “I still wanted the option of knowing that I, alone, would not have to be the steward of my financial destiny.”

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In the end, we reconcile the dilemmas Austen fantasies pose by bastardizing her work a little, cherry-picking from it. We hearken back to a Hollywood-reimagined time that never was and invest her heroines with more self-determinative power than they actually had. “It’s a way-we-never-were sort of fantasy,” says Looser. In a famous 1940 essay on Austen’s work called “Regulated Hatred,” the critic D.W. Harding wrote that it’s these licences that Austen fans are prone to take with her work that she would have loathed the most. He writes: “her books are, as she meant them to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked; she is a literary classic of the society which attitudes like hers, held widely enough, would undermine.” Today, this translates into a bunch of flighty Lydia Bennets looking to imagine for a few hours that they could be a little more self-possessed, like their big sister Elizabeth.

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