Eligible

Imagine Elizabeth Bennett racing a lycra-clad Mr Darcy through the streets of Cincinatti, and appearing with him on a reality television show based on “The Bachelor”. At first glance it’s unthinkable and certainly not for the purists but you have to hand it to Sittenfeld, if you’re brave enough to take on the task of up-dating a classic as well-loved as Pride & Prejudice you might as well go the whole hog and throw every modern trope into the mix, as she has here. As part of the Austen Project Sittenfeld was commissioned to re-write P&P to appeal to a modern audience –Joanna Trollope had already done Sense & Sensibility and Val McDermid, Northanger Abbey. The difference is that Trollope and McDermid just took Austen’s characters and situations and plonked them down whole in modern settings where they sat mightily uneasily, I have to say. How do you translate the problems faced by women in the 18th and 19th centuries, brought about by the inheritance laws of the time, to the 21st century and make it in any way believable? 

Sittenfeld has come up with all kinds of ingenious ideas to solve this problem, some more convincing than others. She has the 2 eldest Bennett girls in their late 30s so that their ticking biological clocks can put pressure on them to settle down (and thus give their mother an understandable reason for wanting them to marry, in order to give her grandchildren). Darcy has become a surgeon (giving him a legitimate reason in this day and age to have a God-complex) and best of all, Bingley’s introduction to Cincinatti “society” is hotly anticipated because he appeared on a season of “Eligible”, a reality show featuring a wealthy bachelor looking for love. 

But still, how do you engineer a story set in modern times that has a mother, father and 5 grown daughters all living under the same roof and threatened with imminent homelessness? Easily as it turns out, in Obama’s recessionary America - have the father fall ill without health insurance, after taking out a second mortgage, thus necessitating the only sensible members of the family, Elizabeth and Jane, to have to return home from New York in order to save their feckless parents and younger siblings from ruin. So the scene is set for this slightly mad but fun romp through Austenland, which, while never coming remotely close to the brilliance of the original, at least has the sense not to show it too much reverence either