The Power of an Ampersand

Pride and Prejudice reimagined as a graphic novel with a magazine-like cover.

The two examples on this page are probably not how you envision Pride and Prejudice. When you think of Austen’s classic, you don’t imagine a seductive cigarette-smoking Colin Firth staring out of the page. You almost certainly don’t imagine a Cosmopolitan-style magazine advertising advice on how to cure your boy-crazy sisters. But both of these unexpected texts preserve something key to Pride and Prejudice: its playfulness.

These texts present Austen’s work in a radically different physical form. They also both change one significant word: “and.” In both, Pride and Prejudice becomes Pride & Prejudice. That small textual change signals their spirit of reimagining: they’ll take the spirit of Austen’s text, but they’ll make it their own.

Both these imaginings of Pride and Prejudice reference film adaptation. The fashionable Regency woman leaning out of the magazine cover looks remarkably like Jennifer Ehle, in her 1995 portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet. The man in the “pulp classics” edition is unquestionably Colin Firth, beloved in Austen circles for his portrayal of Mr. Darcy in the same BBC miniseries.

But these books’ creativity when it comes to adaptation goes far beyond film. Both of them recast Austen in their own ways, showing the broad range of her text. They also make us wonder how Austen might have been read in her own day. When Austen wasn’t yet a classic, her novels were read popularly and enjoyed without the pressure of prestige. Perhaps these more popular editions are, in a way, closer to Austen’s living text.

In a letter to her sister Cassandra, Austen described Pride and Prejudice as “light, bright, and sparkling”—even to a fault. The same description also seems to apply oddly well to two modern genres: magazines and comic books. Nancy Butler’s Pride & Prejudice is a comic book masquerading as a magazine. Both forms make sense in an Austen adaptation because they let us interact with Austen’s text as something to amuse us on a rainy day with its wit and characters. Pride and Prejudice is a social satire, and what better way to express a social satire than in social forms?

This spread from Butler's comic book depicts the assembly at Meryton.

The joke of Pride and Prejudice, the “pulp” edition, is in the mismatch between our expectations and its reality. The publishers know we expect Austen’s text to be classic, elegant, and immortal—so they’ve presented Pride & Prejudice in exactly the opposite way.

Pulp fiction books are cheap. They’re exciting and often lurid stories, made to be read exactly once before their bindings fall apart and they disintegrate into yellowed paper-flakes. These publishers have exaggerated the effect even more by coloring the edges of the book bright red. Reading the novel in this form, one can only imagine that the womanizing Mr. Wickham, the scandal of the elopement, and Mr. Darcy’s heroic rescue would all take on a new and more hard-boiled significance.