Darcy and Elizabeth – Again

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Alexander McCall Smith, American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible, Harper Collins, Jane Austen, Joanna Trollope, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Val McDermid

Can there ever be too much exposure to Darcy and Elizabeth?

Best-selling American author Curtis Sittenfeld thinks not. Talking of her new novel, Eligible, she says “I wanted (my book) to be an homage to Pride and Prejudice.  But I didn’t want it to be so similar that it didn’t contain surprises.”

Eligible is part of the Austen Project announced in 2011 by Harper Collins. First came Joanna Trollope’s contemporary version of Sense and Sensibility; then Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey; followed by Alexander McCall Smith’s Emma.

None of these have been particularly well received, but Sittenfeld has written about the vexed question of class before, in American Wife, based on former first lady, Laura Bush. She thinks placing the story in contemporary America is valid. “The pressure to get married, or have children, still exists, it just exists much later,” she says. “I didn’t want to make the characters identical, but I did want to be able to use the same adjectives to describe them. So you could still say of my Darcy that he is smart, aloof, a little bit rude, but very ethical. Or of my Liz that she is bright, funny and inquisitive, but maybe a little antagonistic in some situations.”

Here is her opening:

“Well before his arrival in Cincinnati, everyone knew that Chip Bingley was looking for a wife.”

I guess this book will be like Marmite: you will either loathe or love it (with Austen purists almost certainly in the former category), but my appetite has been whetted.

The book will be out on April 21.

 

 

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Repeated expressions – to understand is to forgive?

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Anthony Trollope, Joanna Trollope, repetitions, Victorian novels, Zadie Smith

Any devotee of Anthony Trollope – and I am one – will be familiar with his habit of repeating his favourite sayings, often drawn from the Bible or classical literature. ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb’, and  ‘Out of the full heart the mouth speaks’, spring to mind. Trollope also constantly re-uses expressions like ‘it was a religion to him that…’ or ‘she had taught herself to think that…’ This to me is all part of the joy and comfort of reading Trollope: here is an author’s voice we come to know and trust. (An aside recommendation: Listen to Timothy West’s perfect readings of the Barchester and Palliser novels – it’s as if Trollope himself is speaking.)

But when modern authors display the same tendency to repeat expressions I wince at what looks like laziness or inattention. For example, I’ve just read Joanna Trollope’s reworking of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, where characters constantly ‘sighed’ or ‘let a beat fall’. They were doing exactly the same in her previous books. I can’t help wondering if once an author becomes established and successful their editors no longer like to point these things out. Or whether they matter anyway.

And I am being unfair and inconsistent: forgiving a Victorian writer for repetitions while nit-picking the writing of his descendant. All writers have their funny little ways. It’s worth noting though that a useful tool for us to check out our own is the find and replace key…

In an article in The Guardian back in 2007 Zadie Smith wrote how in each of her novels somebody ‘rummages in their purse’ for something; she was, she said, too lazy and thoughtless and unaware to separate ‘purse’ from its old persistent friend ‘rummage’. She called this sleepwalking through a sentence; re-presenting to readers what is pleasing and familiar, pandering to a shared short-cut understanding. If it’s only a sentence it’s not much to be ashamed of, but Zadie Smith suggested that for many writers there will be paragraphs, whole characters, whole books through which one sleepwalks and for which inauthentic is truly the correct term.

 

Sense & Sensibility reworked; Austenian happy endings

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Alfa Romeo, Austen Project, Edward Ferrars, happy endings, Jane Austen, Joanna Trollope, Northanger Abbey, Radio 4, Sense & Sensibility, Woman's Hour

New to me, but probably not to you, is The Austen Project, which will see updated versions of JA’s great canon. The first is Joanna Trollope’s ‘Sense & Sensibility’. You can hear Joanna T talking about it on the 24 October edition of Radio 4’s ‘Woman’s Hour’ – at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03dvbyp (first item). She recognises that Austen purists might not approve of such modernised versions and so advises them not to read hers. Her book was also covered in the ‘Times’ (and no doubt other newspapers) on 25 October. One of the changes she makes is that Willoughby drives an Alfa Romeo instead of riding a magnificent horse; and Edward Ferrars is looking for work in the charity field instead of seeking a parish where he could be vicar.

As there has even been a version of ‘Pride & Prejudice’ involving zombies JA probably fares rather well at the hands of JT!

Joanna Trollope says in the ‘Woman’s Hour’ interview that she feels that Jane Austen rather loses interest in her happy endings. That is the impression I got in ‘Northanger Abbey’, which I’ve just reread after 45+ years. There the loose ends seem to be tidied up in remarkably good time and fortune suddenly smiles on almost all.

Joanna Trollope’s version of S&S is out now. Go to http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349163-sense-sensibility for more info.

Must you finish a book you’ve started?

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Guilt, Joanna Trollope, Literature, Maeve Binchy, Mobile libraries, Reading, Tess of the d'Urbervilles

I feel guilty if I don’t finish a book I’ve started to read. It nags at me somewhat that I’ve never got round to reading the rest of ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’. Maybe I inherited this from my parents. But, when she was in her 80s, my mother said to me, “I’ve realised that at my age if I’m not enjoying a book, I don’t have to read it. There are plenty of others.” And indeed there were – the mobile library came outside her house each fortnight and gave her another stack of Maeve Binchy or Joanna Trollope etc. (A service that I believe has, sadly, now been cut from her area.) Is there a difference between closing an unfancied book for ever then starting a more promising one, and changing channels on the TV? Or should I do my duty and go back to ‘Tess’?