With the onset of the silly season, 'literature' doesn't get much sillier than this...
Will all things Jane Austen ever fall out of favour? It seems not. Her books have spawned countless schools of 'janeite' thought and criticism, and have pervaded popular culture - from Bridget Jones to the BBC. However, you don't have to be a Jane fanatic to giggle at a new take on her witty and well-known prose this holiday season.
Pride and Promiscuity's subtext - 'the lost sex scenes of Jane Austen' - promises delicious and abundant naughtiness. After all, who hasn't wondered what really went on behind the scenes in Jane Austen's nineteenth century England, where the glimpse of an ankle was enough to shock an entire village and the merest sniff of illicit sex could disgrace a family for generations?
Hilariously, a few guillable readers were initially taken in by author Arielle Eckstut's parody when it was first released, and believed that Austen had actaully penned the saucy scenes. This was largely thanks to Eckstut's creation of Austen scholar, Professor Elfrida Drummond, who introduces each 'wickedly funny' vignette, and the clever mimicry of Austen's phrasing and use of language in the creation of the scenes.
If you've ever wondered how Pride and Prejudice's Charlotte Lucus manages to stay sane in her marriage to the appalling Mr Collins - all is revealed. Thanks to a cast-off gown from Lady
Catherine De Bourgh and a somewhat well-used riding crop, Charlotte discovers that you don't have to be romantic to spice up married life. Part of the enjoyment in Austen's books is the repressed undercurrent of sexuality - perhaps most famously between Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett. But there's nothing repressed about what literature's favourite couple gets up to in the grounds of Pemberley, while carrying on a staggeringly boring conversation. Emma's Frank and Mr Knightley have an unusual encounter in the billiard room, while suitably, Emma doesn't need anyone but herself to have a good time. Hugh Hefner would probably blush at Eckstut's 'real' version of the play in Mansfield Park, and Mr Bingley's sisters show their true colours during Jane Bennett's rather more interesting sleepover.
Pride and Promiscuity has had mixed reviews - some readers have found it deliriously funny, while others have found it trite and acually quite boring. And it could be that the idea of this book was actually better than its finished product. The president of the Jane Austen society labels it 'Wickedly funny' while AS Byatt was horrified at the make-a-buck-quick novelty aspect of it. With Jane Austen such a personal favourite of so many readers, literary agent Eckstut must have known the furor and hilarity this book would elicit when it was released - and in a way, that's part of the fun. It's a book that can't be taken too seriously - it's far too weightless for that.
It's a quick read (it'll only take an hour or two) and is a perfectly silly gift or stocking filler for anyone remotely interested in Jane Austen (or sex for that matter)!
Rediscover (or read for the first time) Jane Austen's classics...
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
Mansfield Park
Northanger Abbey
Persuasion
Emma
The Complete Novels of Jane Austen
In 2002, two amateur Jane Austen scholars, while staying at a Hertfordshire estate, stumbled upon a hidden cache of manuscript pages and made an extraordinary literary discovery - lost scenes from Jane Austen's novels that reveal an altogether different dimension to her oeuvre. Hidden by Jane Austen's younger sister Cassie in 1818, these missing pages throw an entirely new light on all of Austen's work making explicit the latent and repressed sexuality that underlies much of her fiction. The discovery also forces new assessments of Austen herself. For along with these pages they found letters to her editor, Thomas Egerton, and her sister arguing and anguishing over the extensive cuts that she was asked to make in order for her novels to be seen as acceptable and decent to her publisher. Pride and Promiscuity is a landmark publication of indescribable importance.
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