Jane Austen

Becoming Jane isn't just a soap opera - it's a soft-soap opera. It tries to flatter audiences into accepting a fictionalized account of the real Jane Austen's love life as the basis for her novel Pride and Prejudice and, indeed, her entire literary output. It isn't a jolly, inventive piece of japery like Shakespeare in Love, which had the light touch and witty bravado to expand our pleasure in Shakespeare's plays by embroidering on them. Becoming Jane (Miramax) Starring Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Julie Walters, Maggie Smith, Laurence Fox. Directed by Julian Jarrold.

Q: I would like to tour England to visit the homes of its famous writers. How can I find out where the various authors lived and what homes are open to the public?A: One of the most comprehensive sources of information, a free foldout map called "Literary Britain," was recently published by the British Tourist Authority.The full-color folder identifies more than 80 locations with ties to about 90 writers, including the homes where many were born and lived, schools and universities they attended and the landscapes, rural and urban, that inspired their work.

THE QUESTION With yet another version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice set to reach Baltimore today, we wonder: Is it merely the ultimate chick-film material or is there something universal about the story that keeps directors and actors lining up? WHAT YOU SAY I wonder if the remake of Pride and Prejudice is less a "chick flick" and more of a classic and a period film. With such films as Master and Commander, Alexander, Troy, Tom Sawyer, etc. I think classic stories are the new "fad" movies.

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: CANT The earliest sense of the protean word cant that the Oxford English Dictionary records is from the seventeenth century: "the whining speech of beggars. " But it was in the eighteenth century that the word dropped the training wheels and really got moving.

Dr. Moreland Perkins, a philosophy professor who taught at the University of Maryland, College Park and was also former mayor of Riverdale Park, died Nov. 7 of pneumonia at St. Joseph Medical Center. The Roland Park resident was 85. "Moreland was highly analytical, sympathetic to mysticism and religion and the spirit of caring for other people. He was a highly principled person," said Dr. John H. Brown, a retired philosophy professor who taught at the University of Maryland, College Park for 39 years.

Somewhere down the list of priorities for President Bush's tax reform effort you'll find a tax most of us will never face. But even for investors who take merely a spectator interest in the tribulations of the rich, the fate of the federal estate tax conveys useful insights. It's the financial planning equivalent of reading Jane Austen novels. The complexities of life at the top mimic ours, with bigger dollar signs. The tax cut bill enacted in 2001, in Bush's first year in office, is a microcosm of the mind-bending complexity Bush now wants to unwind.

Title: "Tell Me Another One: A Woman's Guide to Men's Classic Lines"Author: Judith Newman; illustrated by Victoria RobertsPublisher: DellLength, price: 103 pages, $7.99 (paperback) So Prince Charming is busy filming another Disney movie, and you have to brave the real world for Valentine's Day? Before you run out to the nearest bar, this little book of men's pick-up lines and observations, some of them hysterically awful, isn't a bad primer in romantic disillusionment.Judith Newman pays homage to the classics -- obvious quotes from Shakespeare and Andrew Marvell, for instance, and steamy movie lines -- but the really funny stuff is what she's collected from friends or has heard herself.

Jacqueline Ann Byrne, an administrative assistant at Anne Arundel Community College, died May 5 of pancreatic cancer at her Severna Park home. She was 66. Born Jacqueline Ann Sommer in Cincinnati, she graduated in 1958 from Mother of Mercy High School there. In 1960, she married Thomas E. Byrne, who survives her. The family moved frequently throughout the 1960s because of Mr. Byrne's service with the Marine Corps. In 1969, the Byrnes moved to Severna Park, where Mrs. Byrne worked as a secretary for several doctors' offices and the YMCA, her husband said.

What's all the rage? Harper's Katie Roiphe spends a considerable effort this month documenting the incidence of incest in contemporary fiction. With examples drawn from Jane Smiley, Russell Banks and others, she proves her observation to be sharp, but her conclusions leave much lacking.The frequency, she says, proves a trend, and the trend, she figures, is reason for the frequency. We've become a nation of voyeurs and, she decides, of soul-baring weaklings searching for cheap thrills in the headlines.

FINALLY, PROOF that all a guy needs to know about the sexual psychology of women (and evolutionary theory) can be found in a 19th century Brit Lit class. Researchers asked 257 undergraduate women at the University of Michigan to read four short descriptions of leading men plucked from the nearly two-centuries-old novels of British authors Sir Walter Scott and Ann Radcliffe. Half were proper heroes (archetypal dads - sensible, gentle, monogamous) and the others were dark heroes or cads (moody, rebellious, self-confident)