Re-Imagining Genre

When Austen was writing, the concept of novelistic genre was still relatively new. The genres a reader of Austen’s day would have recognized are decidedly different from the ones we know. This may be one of the primary sources of Austen misreading. We try to categorize Austen into labels: her books are portrayed as either serious literary classics, or romantic comedies. Of course Pride and Prejudice is romantic, and of course it’s a comedy—it’s hilarious—but it’s misleading to think of the original book as a “romance” or “romantic comedy” in the way we consider the genres. Austen’s audience wouldn’t have had the same expectations.

The books in this section are all wonderful examples of Austen being rewritten through genre, and they are not alone. Austen has been rewritten as sci-fi, western, graphic novel, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. Here you'll see Pride and Prejudice as a children’s book, a play, a murder mystery, and a California romance.

Learning about the number 4 in A BabyLit Counting Primer.

Not much existed in the way of children’s literature when Austen was alive, but now her novel flourishes as a children’s board book, Pride and Prejudice: A BabyLit Counting Primer, shown above. It was also adapted by A. A. Milne, best known for his Winnie-the-Pooh books, into a play called Miss Elizabeth Bennet.

Death Comes to Pemberley and Eligible take Pride and Prejudice even farther into the realm of genre fiction. Eligible makes it clear from the cover exactly what genre it is, and what we should expect. In Death Comes to Pemberley, Pride and Prejudice takes on the mysterious quality of Northanger Abbey. Henry Tilney wouldn’t approve, but it has its own television series.

If these books show anything, it’s that Austen’s text is flexible and constantly adapting. When a text changes this much over 200-odd years, and survives so many transformations, one begins to wonder whether Pride and Prejudice is a singular text at all. Is it one book? Is it a physical object? Or is it, now, an object of culture itself?