(Illustration from A Memoir of Jane Austen, 1870)
The Austen Project – instigated presumably by HarperCollins, who are publishing its fruits – has commissioned six well-known authors to provide ‘new’ versions of Jane Austen’s novels. Joanna Trollope, Val McDermid, Alexander McCall Smith and Curtis Sittenfield have tackled Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Emma and Pride and Prejudice; the others have not yet been issued. I read Trollope’s Sense & Sensibility a few years ago and have just finished McDermid’s Northanger Abbey and I have to admit I am underwhelmed by both. Not that Trollope and McDermid are poor writers or that the books are not enjoyable, but that their works act as perfect examples of the dangers of updating older novels.
Whether by instruction or choice, both writers have stuck quite closely to the original plot and characters and while they have done their best, the jarring notes this approach produces just highlights how much society has changed in two hundred years. Elinor, Marianne and Catherine are teenagers in these modern versions as well as in the originals, and I struggled to believe that middle-class parents these days would jump for joy at the prospect of their seventeen-year-old daughter getting engaged. The authors also felt constrained to have their characters meet each other face to face, as would have been necessary in Austen’s time, when nowadays surely the telephone would have been employed (a particularly egregious example is Henry Tilney’s panicked overnight drive down to see Cat after he discovers that she’s been thrown out of his father’s house; if you were truly worried that someone had not got home safely why wouldn’t you phone, text or email them first?).
For me, Trollope’s novel worked less well than McDermid’s. Trollope’s characters never struck me as much like modern teenagers – at least McDermid’s Cat Morland made liberal use of her mobile: Trollope was a bit vague about social media – and oddly didn’t seem to have any friends. Elinor is forced to quit her degree in architecture in London because the family are moving to the West Country to downsize. It’s as if student grants and student digs don’t exist, and it’s only at the end of the novel that the family discovers there are universities outside London anyway. While Trollope always writes fluently, her retelling lacked Austen’s sharpness and, far from commenting acutely on modern manners, which might be in the spirit of Austen, she describes a class so upper-upper-middle and so divorced from mainstream society that it was difficult to believe it existed or have much patience with the perceived travails of its characters. However, I did think that Trollope did an extremely good job with Mrs Dashwood, who was convincingly impractical, vague and self-indulgent.
Despite being disappointed with Sense and Sensibility, I had high hopes of Northanger Abbey and overall I felt that this version worked better. McDermid cleverly substitutes Edinburgh during the Festival for Bath during the Season, and this works very well. She also, as Austen did, uses her book to poke sly fun at fiction, in this case literary snobbery, although again she shies away from much social commentary. But like Trollope, where McDermid follows Austen too closely, things go awry. The most marked instance of this is Cat’s love of vampire fiction, and her growing concern that the Tilneys are vampires. McDermid failed utterly to convince me that any seventeen-year-old girl could possibly believe that vampires really exist. It might have worked better had she substituted crime fiction for gothic horror and have Cat fancy General Tilney a serial killer, but even so she would have needed to work harder to build up Cat’s delusion so that the reader could understand if not necessarily share it.
If you are in need of a pleasant and undemanding read, then both of these novels are fine. But what they showed to me is that it’s better to be freer with your material than either Trollope or McDermid felt they could be. Longbourn by Jo Baker, Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (not the film!) and Bride and Prejudice are all more successful works; they don’t seek merely to replicate but to winkle out aspects of Pride and Prejudice that can be used in interesting ways to create something similar but fresh.
Do you know of any good Austen adaptations?