Pride and Prejudice Re-Imagined
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If you’ve been hanging around here for a while, you’ll know how much I love Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
It’s a social commentary. It’s a romance. It’s a very special book to me. My husband actually proposed with a copy of P&P. We had P&P decor at our wedding in the form of paper roses made from pages of up-cycled paperbacks of Pride and Prejudice.
So today, in honour of the 243rd anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth (December 16, 1775), I want to share with you some of my favourite Pride and Prejudice Re-Imaginings.
These retellings bring the story into a new time or place, or tell the story from a unique perspective. They play with the characters and themes that Jane Austen wrote about and explore what makes them, and the story, work.
Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin
Pride and Prejudice in a contemporary Toronto Muslim community.
Ayesha is a poet, who is working as a substitute teacher to help her family make ends meet. Her aunties all want her to hurry up and find a man, especially now with her younger cousin Hafsa is batting away marriage proposal after marriage proposal. Khalid is a traditional man who is frustrated with how he’s judged for the way he dresses. When Ayesha and Khalid have to work together on a project for their mosque, they butt heads. And yet… there’s something there.
See my full review of Ayesha at Last.
Buy now on Book Depository
Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld
Pride and Prejudice set in contemporary Cincinnati, complete with a reality TV dating show.
Liz Bennet is a magazine writer in her late thirties. Her older sister Jane is a yoga instructor. Both single, they head home from NYC to help out after their father has a heart attack. Enter a handsome doctor or two, one of whom happens to be a reality tv star, add in a crumbling family home, some self-obsessed younger sisters, a mother determined to get her daughters married off, and you might just have a whole of of pride and prejudice.
Buy now on Book Depository
Pride by Ibi Zoboi
Pride and Prejudice set in contemporary Brooklyn with an all black cast.
Zuri Benitez loves her neighbourhood and the apartment building she and her family have spent their life in. The community is tight and spend their time together gathering on the stoop and sharing block party meals. Then a rich family buys and renovates the run-down mini-mansion across the street and moves in. The Darcy family doesn’t fit into the neighbourhood. They’re part of the changes that keep coming. Zuri doesn’t like all this change, or Darius Darcy. And yet, his brother Ainsley seems to really like her sister Janae. And Janae seems really happy.
Buy now on Book Depository
Longbourn by Jo Baker
Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the servants.
Sarah the housemaid observes a lot. She doesn’t always understand it, and she often can’t hear or see the full story because she has a lot of work to do, but the happenings in the Bennett household are certainly interesting. And then, even more interestingly, a new footman arrives and upends all the normalcy below stairs as things go haywire above stairs. This book is a very different experience of Pride and Prejudice, and is definitely a worthwhile read.
Buy now on Book Depository
There are so many more Pride and Prejudice re-imaginings out there that I haven’t read yet!
- Heartstone by Elle Katharine White (Pride and Prejudice with dragons!)
- Definitely, Maybe in Love by Ophelia London
- The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet: A Novel by Bernie Su (There’s a YouTube series too)
- Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe by Melissa De La Cruz
- A Higher Education: A Modern Retelling of Pride & Prejudice by Rosalie Stanton
- First Impressions: A Contemporary Retelling of Pride and Prejudice by Debra White Smith
- Pride and Prejudice and Passports: A Modern Retelling by Corrie Garrett
- Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal (Available January 15, 2019)
Have you read any of the ones I love?
Have you read any of the ones I haven’t read yet?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Jorie
Hallo, Hallo Trisha Jenn,
I was by earlier in the day, but with the heavy rains & winds – the errands and just the regular chaos of life being lived I never had the chance to tell you why I was excited about this post! You see, we share a mutual passion for Pride and Prejudice! For me, its because it was my first Austen reading and somehow, it has remained so, but I’m trying to read more Austen this Winter to make amends for that whilst captialising on more Austen readings in August as that is when #AustenInAugust generally is hosted. For me that means Roof Beam Reader’s blog but I know someone else generally hosts an event of the same name as well.
During this year’s #ThanksgivingReadathon, I actually had the pleasure of joy doing a #25PagePreview post about the #Mythothon selections I made during Lou’s readathon? PRIDE happened to be one of my picks and it became my *second book hug* of joy for the month of November during that readathon!
Unsure if you saw me tweeting and blogging about PRIDE but here were my thoughts — I’m going to be reading the book in full this December and sharing those reflections before New Year’s… however, I wrote quite a bit of layered thoughts just based on what I found within those initial pages!! I’ll have to see if you wrote a review yourself after I conclude my own thoughts…
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*Longbourn* has been on my TBR for absolute ages!! I do hope I’ll get to this at long last during [2019]!!!
It will take me time to go through this lovely list of yours – to see if I can spy out a new re-telling I hadn’t come across myself!! I’ll let you know as time moves forward when I’m devouting time for Austen in my readerly life which of these are ones I’ve decided to pick up to read!! Til then, thanks for giving me a lot of joy reading your thoughts and finding another PRIDE appreciator!!!