Over the past
several years we’ve seen a flood of Austen reimaginings. From Bollywood’s
‘Bride and Prejudice’ to ‘Lost in Austen’ and ‘Clueless’, Austen’s characters
have found themselves far away from their Regency drawing rooms. And it’s not
just screen adaptations. The Jane Austen
Project from Harper Collins recruited big name authors to reimagine all six
of Austen’s novels in contemporary settings. Excitingly, this year we’ll also
be seeing a number of LGBT+ retellings—including my own, of course!
But why
Austen? What is it about her works that inspires writers to retell her stories
over and over, to adapt them for the screen, and to transpose them into a world
so markedly different from Austen’s?
Perhaps the
most fundamental reason is that they work so well.
Austen’s
heroines and heroes slip out of their muslin gowns or buckskin breeches and
into a pair of jeans with ease. Unlike Dickens, whose characters shoulder a
weight of social commentary, or the Bronte’s, whose characters are drenched in
Victorian melodrama, Austen’s characters travel light. They leave her pages
almost naked, ready to step seamlessly into the modern world. None of which is
to imply that her characters lack depth. They are rich, fully developed people
who readers find relatable and compelling even 200 years after Austen’s death.
And that’s not an easy trick.
Hey, don’t I know you?
Austen’s
ability to create characters that not only leap off the page through their
dialogue but also feel fresh and real even two hundred years later is remarkable.
Who hasn’t tried to escape a Miss Bates around the water cooler, or sat next to
a Harriet Smith on the bus and listened to her obsess with her BFF over her latest
boyfriend drama?
But just as
importantly, they exist independently of the period in which they live. Their nineteenth
century speech patterns and language aside, the characters talk and act like people
you might meet at work, people who could easily be your friends, your family,
or the love of your life. They feel like real people because Austen wrote real people.
She didn’t write stereotypes or caricatures, and the only points her characters
make are about fundamental human nature. “For what do we live,” asks Mr.
Bennet, “but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” It
turns out that, by and large, people are as risible today as they were two
hundred years ago.
Spare me the details
“Mr. Bennet
protested against any description of finery.” And so does Austen. Look as hard
as you like and you’ll see no description of finery, or anything else, in
Austen’s work. Even the delectable Darcy is only sketched as ‘tall’ and
‘handsome’. Austen’s characters reveal themselves in different ways, through
their actions and words, and Austen allows them to earn our respect or ridicule
accordingly. Which leaves readers plenty of room to interpret the characters as
they choose, and so each generation can find something of themselves in her
heroes and heroines.
It’s not only
physical details that Austen avoids. She’s often criticised for the lack of
social context in her work. Where are the conversations about the abolitionist
movement, the wars with France, or the social unrest ravaging Regency England? Helena
Kelly’s book Jane Austen, The Secret Radical makes a
compelling argument that readers of the day would have read more subtly and
knowingly than modern readers, that they would have understood more than we do
about what Austen’s characters were and were not saying between the lines. (And
let’s not forget that Austen was writing at a time of repressive sedition laws
that restricted severely what she could print). Kelly’s book is a fantastic read
and I recommend it thoroughly to any Austen fan.
But perhaps
one of the side-effects for modern readers of being somewhat blind to Austen’s
subtle social commentary is that her characters appear to be highly context-free.
We can lift them from her pages and put them in our own world without losing
anything essential. Better than that, we can allow them to interact with our
own society and contextualise them in a way that reflects our world without it
feeling forced.
Get me out of here!
If Austen’s
novels have one consistent theme, it’s the heroines’ pursuit of freedom. Whether
it’s Emma Woodhouse finding a way to marry and yet keep something of her
independence, or Elizabeth Bennett finding the financial security her careless father
failed to provide, Austen’s heroines start the novels trapped by society and circumstance
and end them free—or as free as was possible for a nineteenth century middleclass
woman. Perhaps Anne Eliot, consigned to an uncertain spinsterhood by poor
choices and her vain, profligate father achieves the greatest freedom in the
end. We can imagine Anne Wentworth accompanying her husband beyond the far
horizon, seeing a world far beyond the claustrophobic constraints of Uppercross
drawing rooms.
Enlightened as
we see ourselves in 2018, we’re still bound by social conventions—race, class,
sexuality, and gender all play their part in limiting our freedoms and
opportunities. Perhaps that’s why Austen’s novels adapt so readily to an LGBT+
retelling; social attitudes toward the LGBT+ community still reflect many of the
restraints nineteenth century England imposed on its inhabitants.
We’re not worthy
Austen was a
genius. No doubt about it. She was a genius of observation, of dialogue, and of
craft, and no re-telling or adaptation of her work will ever equal the original.
If you haven’t read them, you’re missing out. But what a re-telling or an
adaptation can do is have fun with
beloved characters and stories, allow us to spend a little more time with them,
and perhaps hint at what Austen may have been writing about had she been living
today.
_________________________________________________________________________
Perfect Day, my contemporary
male/male retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, is published on 13th
August 2018.
Love
doesn’t burn out just because the timing’s wrong. It grows. It never leaves.
When Joshua
Newton, prodigal son of one of New Milton’s elite, fell in love with ambitious
young actor Finn Callaghan, his world finally made sense. With every stolen
moment, soft touch and breathless kiss, they fell deeper in love.
Finn was his
future…until he wasn’t.
Love
stays. Even when you don’t want it to, even when you try to deny it, it stays.
Eight years
later, Finn has returned to the seaside town where it all began. He’s on the
brink of stardom, a far cry from the poor mechanic who spent one gorgeous
summer falling in love on the beach.
The last
thing he wants is a second chance with the man who broke his heart. Finn has
spent a long time forgetting Joshua Newton—he certainly doesn’t plan to forgive
him.
Love
grows. It never leaves.
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