Dancing with Mr Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen

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From Bridget Jones’s Diary to Bollywood’s Bride and Prejudice, from the Regency-horror mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to the forthcoming sci-fi film Pride and Predator, it seems that Jane Austen’s work is being appropriated by contemporary culture in ever more playful and creative ways. The fact that most of the modern interest in Austen converges on just one of her novels, however, suggests that the role she plays for us might actually be dwindling, even as her presence around us seems to be on the increase. It’s as if Pride and Prejudice has become a sort of shorthand for a whole style of literature, distracting us from the range and depth of its author’s work, and offering us instead a cartoon Austen, a thing of fussy bonnets and silly manners, easy to pastiche. When I was approached by Chawton House Library and invited to judge the final stage of the short-story competition which formed the basis for this anthology, I was delighted, but also trepidatious – fearful that I would find this cartoon Austen reproduced in the stories I was asked to judge; that I would encounter nothing but Elizabeth Bennets engaged in perpetual pallid dalliances with cardboard Mr Darcys.

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