Their biggest problem is not the entailed estate of Longbourn but rather the ticking of their biological clocks. Jane and Elizabeth are near forty, rather than young women in their early twenties.
(250)īy titling her retelling Eligible, Sittenfeld hints at a shift of focus. It’s easy to picture Jane Austen smiling at this:Īll five girls had then gone on to private colleges before embarking on what could euphemistically be called non-lucrative careers, though in the case of some sisters, non-lucrative, non-careers was a more precise descriptor. Sittenfeld’s group portrait of the Bennet clan was one of my favorite parts of Eligible. Socially awkward Mary is pursuing her third online master’s degree while Kitty and Lydia, as crass and self-absorbed as ever, are obsessed with working out at the gym and following trendy diets.
Their practical assistance and support are needed because their younger sisters while living at home, are little help to their parents. Jane and Liz have carved out careers in Manhattan: the eldest Miss Bennet teaches yoga while her sister writes features for a magazine.
Bennet’s life revolves around country club gossip and planning luncheons for the Women’s League. Bennet spends as much time as possible alone at his computer, while Mrs. Brief, episodic chapters mirror the short attention span of a digital era audience. In Eligible, the tension between the original story and Sittenfeld’s inventions kept me turning pages. Many of the issues that Austen’s characters grappled with are barely recognizable if they exist at all in modern daily life.
While P&P-inspired books and films such as Bridget Jones’ Diary and Bride and Prejudice demonstrate that the story and its themes have broad appeal, I wondered how Sittenfeld’s Eligible would handle the main plot points in a modern setting. Curtis Sittenfeld, the author of four novels including Prep and American Wife, was chosen to take on Austen’s best-known work, Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen is a tough act to follow and that is exactly what the Austen Project asks contemporary authors to do: reimagine one of Austen’s novels in the here and now.
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