Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld is the fourth in the Austen Project of modern retellings of Jane Austen’s novels and attempts to bring her classic Pride and Prejudice into the 21st century. Having read the other three Austen adaptations, I was intrigued to see how Sittenfeld would update the story of Elizabeth, Darcy, Jane and Bingley. From experience I know that Austen adaptations, when done well, can be wonderful. (check out The Lizzie Bennet Diaries on YouTube if you don’t believe me.) I really, really wanted to like this book – I love Jane Austen, and the pre released teaser sample sounded excellent – but no matter how hard I tried, it didn’t sit well with me. In the interests of fairness, given how well known and beloved Pride and Prejudice has become, it was always going to be one of the trickier ones to adapt. Let me talk about what I liked first. What I liked The modernisation. Many things in the update worked surprisingly well. The transfer of the action from Hertfordshire to Cincinnati was seamless and gave a very similar flavour of the small town mentality that caused Darcy’s snobbish attitude. The Bennet family’s future being at risk…
Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid is the second in The Austen Project series of novels which are modern retellings by contemporary authors of Jane Austen’s classics. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t have the baggage of my knowledge and love of the original as I had with the first, I much preferred this second outing to Joanna Trollope’s updating of Sense and Sensibility. Austen’s original story of Northanger Abbey tells the story of a sheltered young girl whose love of gothic novels leads her to make some very strange assumptions about the family of the young man she meets while visiting Bath. During the novel she learns to separate fiction from reality and to develop a better understanding of human motivations. What I liked The updating. I felt McDermid did a much better job than Trollope of bringing Austen’s characters into the 21st century. They felt modern and fresh and their motivations seemed in line with a modern teenager or young person. I could easily imagine sitting down to coffee with Cat and Ellie to discuss the latest novel. And as evidenced by John Thorpe and Frederick Tilney, men who are too full of self-importance to consider the wishes of the…
Sense and Sensibility by Joanna Trollope is the first in The Austen Project series of books in which contemporary writers rework Austen’s classics to bring them into the modern day. In a world without the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Emma Approved and Clueless, Trollope’s updating of Sense and Sensibility might appear fresh and fun. In comparison to these other modernisations, however, it comes across as unimaginative and safe. Too often it appears Trollope has simply transposed the characters and situations from Regency England to the modern day without using more up to date equivalents. A few references to Facebook and Twitter don’t make a modern adaption. In all fairness, perhaps Trollope was given a tight brief by HarperCollins to keep it close to the original. What I liked Faithful to Austen’s characters. Trollope stayed true to Austen’s characters. Elinor is still the level head of the family, Marianne is still a hopeless romantic, Willoughby is still a cad. The relationships between them remained true to the original – the interactions between the characters still follow the same themes. The characters follow the same development arcs. It’s clear Trollope understands the motivations of her characters and the main themes of the…