Updating Jane Eyre is tougher because it's both a marriage plot and a gothic romance
Pride and Prejudice gave us an enduring romantic comedy formula, and it’s easy to update it with only minimal tweaking here and there.
It’s a story that is always funny and sexy and romantic, as many times as we tell it and retell it.
We love watching Lizzie and Darcy meet, despise each other, and fall in love, no matter what time period they live in. Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bride and Prejudice proved as much. All you really have to do is update the brand names and the pop culture references.Įven if you want to focus on the romance more than the satire, you don’t have to work too hard to transform Pride and Prejudice into a straightforward romantic comedy. Austen’s comedy of manners is still funny when it’s applied to our contemporary world - her social satire uses the same template as ours does, and Eligible illustrates that, like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries before it. Of course that cad Wickham is a Nathaniel P. Much of the pleasure of reading Eligible is in recognizing how Sittenfeld has updated the archetypes of Austen’s era with those of our own: O f course Kitty and Lydia, Lizzie’s officer-obsessed little sisters, are into CrossFit now. Instead of engaging in charged ballroom banter, they have hate sex. Meanwhile, Austen’s gentleman Darcy becomes a brain surgeon from a moneyed background. In Eligible, Austen’s 20-year-old Lizzie Bennet becomes 38-year-old Liz Bennet, a feminist writer who's been aged up to make her mother’s hysteria over her singledom slightly more believable. Modernizing Pride and Prejudice, as Eligible does, is a simple proposition They’re both successful adaptations - smart about which elements of their source material don't require any change versus which could use a quick sprucing up, and effective at drawing out interesting tones from the source novels - but they use very, very different strategies. So it’s no surprise that two of this season's new releases are adaptations of these beloved stories: Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible, a modernization of Pride and Prejudice, and Lyndsay Faye’s Jane Steele, which reimagines Jane Eyre. When we talk about marriage plots, we’re almost always, on one level or another, talking about these two iconic books. Their novels - especially Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Brontë’s Jane Eyre - defined and codified the genre. It was developed in 18th-century novels like Pamela and Clarissa, and it lives on today in romantic comedies and romance novels.īut our most beloved marriage plots came to be in the 19th century, in the works of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. Meanwhile, their long, troubled trip to the altar provides the narrative thrust of the story. It’s a simple form: Two people meet, fall in love, and encounter (and overcome) a few obstacles before ultimately marrying. The marriage plot is a uniquely satisfying and enduring narrative.