The occasional exception to the blandness is Mr. Whereas one of the chief joys of reading Pride and Prejudice comes from watching Elizabeth guess and misread the secret motivations of the other characters, Sittenfeld’s cast is blunt, their dialogue stilted and uninspired. Sittenfeld sets her prose in direct comparison to Austen’s subtle and perfect dialogue, and Eligible suffers for it. While most of the well-received P&P adaptations are via film and television, a retelling by book is riskier.
Perhaps Eligible fails through the medium. While I’m at it, You’ve Got Mail is great too. I adored the web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which is one of the most creative and engaging P&P variations I’ve ever seen. This past February, I enjoyed Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on the big screen, which makes surprisingly clever digs at the original as well as the 1995 BBC and the 2005 Joe Wright adaptations, and I’ve laughed during the miniseries Lost in Austen and the Bollywood-style Bride and Prejudice. In defense of my snobbishness, I’m not necessarily an Austen purist. To point out where exactly those differences are would require me to divulge the plot of Eligible, which I won’t do because once you take away its few twists there is little left to enjoy. Though the novel more or less ends up where its predecessor does (albeit with a surging degree of absurdity toward the end), the points of tension in the plot differ. The characters and setup take directly from the original, but once Sittenfeld has the stage laid, Eligible diverges to tackle issues like financial independence, hate sex, feminism, reality shows, and gender identity.
Liz Bennet writes for a women’s magazine, Jane Bennet is a yoga instructor, Kitty and Lydia are CrossFit fiends, and Darcy and Bingley are doctors. In Sittenfeld’s version, Hertfordshire is Cincinnati and Pemberley is a California mansion.
Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, and Sisterland, takes on a modern adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in her novel Eligible.
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