People are buzzing about the fact that he’s this quasi-celebrity, and they know that he’s looking for a wife. And I thought, If I’m transplanting everything to Cincinnati in 2013, how would people in this midsized Midwestern city know that there’s a new man in town and that he’s single? It killed two birds with one stone if he’d been on a show like The Bachelor but not found love on it. But the content of that sentence is introducing us to a single man who’s just arrived in this English village in the early 1800s. ” I really didn’t want to use the phrase, because I feel that’s the ultimate predictable way you would start a retelling of Pride and Prejudice. There’s the famous first line, which I replicated to some extent: “It’s a truth universally acknowledged. Was that a big flash of inspiration for you? I actually came to that backwards. I thought it was clever to use reality TV: Reality dating shows are so formulaic, and courtship in Austen’s time was rigid and proscriptive. But everything mixes optimally in Pride and Prejudice. She’s putting in these ingredients-of humor and romance and class commentary-that are in all her novels. It’s almost like a recipe: You can make the same recipe more than once and it turns out better at different times. But somehow the way it all comes together in Pride and Prejudice is extra satisfying. Her books are pretty similar in terms of their themes and, to some extent, their characters.
Why does the book feel like such a homecoming? I had an opportunity to consider that. I feel that way about Pride and Prejudice. I respect and admire the others, but Pride and Prejudice is a novel that I almost feel like I’ve climbed inside, as a reader. Were there other Austen books you would have preferred to adapt? I would not have wanted to do a different novel. It’s taking something real and then making it my own. That book borrows the architecture of a real person’s life, and this book borrows the architecture of another novel. My friends said, “It’s kind of what you did with American Wife,” which is loosely based on the life of Laura Bush.
But before I did, I thought, Well, I’ll reread Pride over Christmas and I’ll see if this is something I could do.
When The Austen Project approached you in 2011 about doing this novel, did you consider saying no? I had the impulse to say no.
Sittenfeld and I discussed that question, why she thinks The Bachelor is brilliant, how she handled the name Fitzwilliam, and more.
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