“I tried to think about how the characters act in Pride and Prejudice, and how they spend their time, and to find present-day equivalents. I wanted them to be recognizable as themselves but also wanted to make it feel fresh.” I wanted them to be recognizable as themselves but also wanted to make it feel fresh.” If you were to describe the characters in Pride and Prejudice, you’d probably use the same or similar adjectives to describe their counterparts in Eligible. “I tried to think about how the characters act in Pride and Prejudice, and how they spend their time, and to find present-day equivalents,” she explains. Making Austen-era characters seem modern took some planning on Sittenfeld’s part. I understand different people will have different reactions to Eligible, and I’m OK with that.” “I definitely see this as an act of homage and admiration, and it’s not like I thought, well, Pride and Prejudice has gotten stale and it falls to me to make it relevant,” she says.

Sittenfeld is quick to point out that the project is not meant to improve upon the original. “When someone offers to pay you to spend a few years in the world of Pride and Prejudice, it’s very hard to say no,” Sittenfeld says during a call to her home in St. How did Sittenfeld, the author of four previous novels, including the bestsellers Prep and American Wife, decide to remake a bona fide classic? She was recruited as part of The Austen Project, in which bestselling authors retell Austen stories in a modern way. Liz and Darcy keep crossing paths (literally-they jog the same route), and their hate-hate relationship slowly transforms into something else.Įligible sparkles with Austen-esque wit and intelligence and is a pure pleasure to read. But Darcy’s friend Chip Bingley, a recent star of a “Bachelor”-like reality TV show, falls for Jane. When Liz is introduced to the handsome but arrogant Fitzwilliam Darcy, a Cincinnati neurosurgeon, she is immediately put off by his arrogance. Kitty and Lydia spend their days at the local CrossFit, and Mary is a perpetual college student.

None of the five Bennet daughters is married-to their mother’s shame-and only Liz and Jane have actual jobs. When her father suffers a health scare, Liz and her beautiful older sister, Jane, decamp to the family home in Cincinnati for the summer to help care for him. She’s in a dead-end relationship, but she doesn’t know it yet. In Eligible, Liz Bennet is a New York City magazine editor on the verge of turning 40. Reimagine a book as beloved and timeless as Pride and Prejudice? Inconceivable! Curtis Sittenfeld is probably one of the few modern authors self-assured-and talented-enough to try.Īnd she succeeds, wonderfully.

Eligible by curtis sittenfeld