On the Never-Ending Barrage of Austen Adaptations

Why must we zombify, emoji-itize, or otherwise “modernize” Jane?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that anything written about Jane Austen must start with that singular phrase. It is as though anyone who ever writes about her secretly wants to be her, as though every writer knows deep, deep down that we will never craft an opening as good as Jane’s.

We are inadequate beside her.

Perhaps this is why writers produce so many “modern” adaptations of Jane Austen’s work. You’ve most likely heard about the zombies. Don’t get me started on the zombies. The reading world turned a blind eye to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — laughed even — and were we thus rewarded with both Emma and the Werewolves and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. No, the zombies are not for discussion.

Fortunately, not all Austen adaptations are so extreme. Secretly, I’m a fan of the movie Clueless, which turns our beloved Emma into Cher, Valley Girl matchmaker extraordinaire. Director Amy Heckerling’s “Emma” is much preferential to the character Alexander McCall Smith rewrites in Emma: A Modern Retelling. McCall Smith’s novel is one of six in the erstwhile Austen Project, a HarperCollins series that charged best-selling novelists with the arduous task of “updating” Jane. McCall Smith makes Emma a private eye. At least she’s not a Twilight fan like the project’s Catherine Morland, who — in Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey — believes her neighbors, the Tilneys, actually are vampires.

Over the last 200 years, Jane Austen’s characters have been turned into everything from rock stars (Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star) to guidance counselors (Jane Austen in Scarsdale) to time-travelers (“Lost in Austen”). Then there’s author Sarah Price’s five Amish retellings; Elizabeth Eulberg’s Prom and Prejudice, in which Connecticut teenagers seek dance dates; and For Darkness Shows the Stars, a novel by Diana Peterfreund blurbed as “Jane Austen’s Persuasion set in a post-apocalyptic world.”

And now, now, as though the shades of Pemberley have not yet been sufficiently polluted, there’s Emoji Pride and Prejudice: Epic Tales in Tiny Texts. “Would Elizabeth call Mr. Darcy a [poop]?,” the back cover asks, assuming Austenites everywhere actually want to know…