That I was going to read Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible (HarperCollins, Rs.350) was inevitable considering I exhibit all of that impatient curiosity displayed by an avid Austen admirer waiting for yet another addition to the many ways in which we keep her legacy alive. So, I turned to this “modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice ” with all the confidence of diving into something familiar: an old blanket in a new cover, a family recipe with a new twist — basically more of the same thing, just done a little differently.
So far, the rest of the books published under HarperCollins’ ‘The Austen Project’, which has bestselling contemporary authors rewriting and retelling Austen’s novels, have all used entirely different approaches, each story shaped by its present-day author as much as its original creator. In 2013, Joanna Trollope took on Sense and Sensibility and stuck almost slavishly close to the original plot. The next year, the project released Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey and placed the story in a world of teenage girls and vampires. Alexander McCall Smith’s Emma , rendered in the author’s trademark style of dry, tongue-in-cheek wit and an air of charm, used just the bare bones of the original plot, so that what emerged was only slightly reminiscent of the original.
The riskiest attemptEligible is The Austen Project’s latest entrant, and its first with an original title. It is also the project’s riskiest book yet, since taking on Austen’s best known work meant working under the shadow of a giant, and navigating a story whose road map has been committed to memory by innumerable readers across the world.
And so, Sittenfeld did the only thing that would, and could, make the retelling work — she kept the map, but ignored its minute directions. She’d take us from point A to B, ensure that Elizabeth and Jane met the loves of their lives, give us most of the little subplots, but she’d do it in her own way, and she’d take her own time.
To begin with, Sittenfeld makes adjustments to the plot itself, because while it fit its 19th century context, a story centred on the sole aim of finding eligible husbands for five intelligent, beautiful women barely in their twenties would sit quite awkwardly when placed in modern-day Cincinnati. Sittenfeld fixes this, to an extent, by doubling the Bennet sisters’ ages — Jane, the oldest, is 39 when we meet her. This gives each Bennet sister, as well as the parents, added years that shape their independent backstories — previous romances, careers, disappointments, and experiences — all helping us understand the dynamics of the Bennet family itself: the almost callous and definitely irresponsible side of Mr. Bennet, the neurotic self-centredness of Mrs. Bennet, and, finally, the reasons each sister has chosen to remain unmarried.
Sittenfeld retains almost all the original names and characters, and when she does digress, it seems inevitable. In Eligible , George Wickham with his glib, superficial charm doesn’t exist because you know instinctively that this older, worldly Elizabeth would find him laughable. With every change to the original plot, we see Sittenfeld’s sharp understanding of Austen’s characters — it seems natural that the 21st century Jane is a placid yoga instructor, Mr. Bingley an E.R. doctor with small-screen ambitions, and Mr. Darcy a brain surgeon with a sort of God complex. It is especially apt that Elizabeth is a journalist. Only Mr. Collins with his wildly successful start-up strikes an incongruent, unexpected note.
Staying within the pagesAfter all, we all have our own ideas about these characters we love and retellings, it would seem, are fleshed out versions of the what-ifs we ask ourselves once a good book ends. What if Elizabeth had to fight zombies ( Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith); what if Jane Eyre had a particularly murderous past ( Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye); and in the case of Eligible , what if the Bennet family lived and loved in modern-day Cincinnati? Adaptations, retellings and fan fiction become ways in which we stay in the world created by a well-loved book, long after the last page is turned — sometimes realistic, sometimes irreverent (I imagine Eligible ’s foul-mouthed Kitty and Lydia receiving a stern lecture on the impropriety of scatological jokes by a disappointed Austen), and sometimes just fantastical, but always borne of a strong, indisputable connection to the original.
In Eligible , Sittenfeld gives us not just romantic and societal intrigues, but also issues of financial constraints, invasion of privacy, feminism, homosexuality and LGBTQ rights, single-parenthood — matters that worry, interest and affect us today. Perhaps in keeping with the times, there is also a loud, brash, almost entirely uninhibited quality to the book, and in this respect Eligible is nothing like its original.
It isn’t necessary to understand a story only by placing it in your own times, but the possibility of being able to relate to a book in a way you couldn’t before adds a new dimension to an existing reading of it. When this reworking is done right, the effect is quite wonderful — like discovering something new, and rediscovering something old, all at once.
swati.d@thehindu.co.in
