Hello Lynn and welcome to our online Jane
Austen club. My first question is, what was your first encounter with Austen and her world like? And was it through reading one of her books or
watching one of the movie/TV adaptations?
My
first experience was reading Pride and Prejudice when I was fifteen years old. I was in the
back of my car and my family were driving from Long Island to Montreal to go
skiing, which was, like, an eight-hour trek, and I’d slept for most of the
trip, so when we arrived at the slopes I’d just gotten up to Mr. Darcy’s letter
to Lizzy and the last thing I wanted to do—I mean, the very last thing—was put
the book down and go ski.
When and how you came to think of
writing a Jane Austen –inspired book?
I
came up with the idea after seeing Bride &
Prejudice—Gurinder Chadha’s Bollywood
adaptation—in the movie theater so that was eleven years ago now. I was waiting
with a friend for her bus and we were chatting about the film and we both
thought it was slightly off because the Elizabeth character was so mean. She
was, we thought, more like the Darcy character, and by the time her bus came,
say, ten minutes later, I had the general idea mapped out. What I loved about
it was how perfectly the names worked with it: Fitzwilliam Darcy becoming Darcy
Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth Bennet becoming Bennet Elizabeth. OK, his last name doesn’t
work at all, and don’t think I haven’t been sulking about that for more than a decade.
What’s surprising in your retelling of Jane
Austen’s most beloved tale is … a gender-bendy twist. Could you tell us more
about your choice and briefly introduce us your characters?
It’s
all hazy now, but years ago I read about a director who switched all the parts
in a Shakespeare play—it might have been Macbeth—to see if the emotional truths held
regardless of gender. That stayed with me and a few years later I wrote a book
about a girl who stages a gender-bendy Hamlet to protest gender inequality in her high school’s drama department. So
as soon as I came up with the idea, I embraced it with both hands because it
dealt with things I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
