After reading such a heart-wrenching book like All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood, I needed something comforting and uplifting.
And what better way to be comforted than to go back to the world of one of my all-time favourites — Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. However, as I have challenged myself this year to read more than 100 books (re-reads don’t count), I decided to give an Austen re-telling a go.
In my experience, re-tellings have a 50-50 chance of being absolutely wonderful or downright awful. There seems to be no middle ground.
Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld, a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice, falls surprisingly under the former. Is it perfect? Not really. As any Austen fan will be sure to point out, there is nothing like the original.
While that is most certainly true for this re-telling, Sittenfeld has done a great job at distilling the spirit of the major themes of the novel and adapting them to modern life. It is much louder than the original, but the essence of parodying society life is very much there.
In this re-telling, Liz is a magazine writer in her late 30s, who like her yoga-instructor sister, Jane, lives in New York.
When their father has a health scare, they go back to their childhood home in Cincinnati to help and discover not only that the sprawling Tudor house they grew up in is crumbling, but no one in the family seems to be interested in doing anything about it.
Younger sisters, Kitty and Lydia, are too busy with cross-fit and paleo diets to get jobs. Mary is on her third online master’s degree with no job or social life prospects or interest in finding any. Mrs. Bennet has only one thing in mind: marrying off her daughters, especially soon to be 40-year-old Jane.
Enter Chip Bingley, a handsome new-in-town doctor, who recently appeared in a dating TV show, and his much less charming friend, Darcy.
All in all this was a lovely, funny and tender re-telling that both updates and honours Austen’s much beloved story. I recommend it for fans of Austen.
It is also part of the Austen Project, a series of modern Austen re-tellings by six different authors, so if you’re feeling in need of an Austen fix with a twist there is more to choose from.
Ariana Galeano is a librarian with the Richmond Public Library
