Maureen Corrigan talks about teaching Jane Austen to college students as part of her Fresh Air tribute to Pride and Prejudice in honor of the book’s 200th anniversary:

We start our voyage out with Robinson Crusoe and often go on to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy — fine, weird novels that seem to hail from a civilization a million light years from our own. Then, we arrive home, on Planet Austen. The relief in the classroom is palpable; the energy of class discussion spikes. It’s certainly not that my students mistake Austen’s world for our own: after all, her novels revolve around the make-or-break perils of a highly ritualized marriage market. Rather, it’s Austen’s smart girl voice: peppery, wry, eye rolling — that seems so close to modern consciousness. Austen could be gal pals with Tina Fey and Lena Dunham; she talks to us directly, bridging time and custom.

Jane Austen’s Regency World:

Albert, a 200lb (91kg) primate reads up to 50 pages a day of Austen’s book.

And he’s so gripped that unless he’s had at least half-an-hour of Elizabeth Bennet’s travails with Mr Darcy, he won’t sleep at night.

Link thanks to our book critic Maureen Corrigan, who will have an appreciation of Pride and Prejudice on the show today in honor of the book’s 200th anniversary.

This year, British mystery lovers in particular have a glorious plum pudding of a whodunit awaiting them. P.D. James has taken up the challenge of feeding readers’ holiday hunger for homicide. What’s even more tantalizing is the fact that James’ latest mystery is also a tribute, of sorts, to one of her most cherished authors, Jane Austen. James’ new novel is called Death Comes to Pemberley: Think Pride and Prejudice meets “Clue.

— Maureen Corrigan reviews PD James’ new novel, which she says she enjoyed immensely..

Linguist Geoff Nunberg weighs in on the recent claim that Jane Austen may have been heavily edited: “She was inconsistent about possessives, and she sometimes put e before i in words like believe and friendship, but you can find the same thing in the manuscripts of Byron and Scott and Thomas Jefferson — the rules just weren’t settled yet. In fact, it’s pure anachronism to describe any of those things as “wrong” or “incorrect”; it’s like calling Elizabeth Bennet a bachelorette. The modern notion of correctness was a recent invention in Austen’s time, and to people of Austen’s sort it smacked of the schoolmaster and the social climber. My guess is that she would have little use for people who went around clucking their tongues over misplaced apostrophes in grocers’ signs — the sort of pedantry she might put in the mouth of Mr. Collins.”

Can’t remember the “i before e” rule? Don’t worry, neither could Jane Austen.

The beloved novelist — author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma — is known for her polished prose, her careful phrasing and her precise grammar. “Everything came finished from her pen,” Austen’s brother, Henry, said in 1818, a year after his sister’s death.

But now — though it may pain die-hard Austen fans — it turns out that Austen may have simply had a very good editor.