Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), describes a society whose members, constantly fearing the loss of personal reputation, ask themselves this question like a reprimand: What will people say? The title’s timeless alliteration also displays how words shape reputation’s near relation–memory. Soniah Kamal’s Unmarriageable (2019), a retelling of Austen’s novel, explores the way in which language impacts cultural and personal memory. Set in Pakistan in the early 2000s, the novel follows Alys Binat and her sisters as they navigate the marriage market, female identity, and British and Pakistani influences on their self-expression. Kamal translates “What will people say?” into Urdu: ” کہیںگے/ Log kya kahenge” (35). She applies a post-colonialist perspective to…
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Privileging the Male Perspective: Wendy van Camp’s The Curate’s Brother
Wendy van Camp’s The Curate’s Brother: A Variation on Persuasion (2015) traces its literary ancestry back to fanfic more than the Regency novel. Whereas the Sir Walter Elliot of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) reads through centuries of his family’s published lineage, the modern reader of Camp’s novelette skims through just over a decade’s worth of literary internet culture deceptively packaged as a period piece (Persuasion 1). Fanfic may have been coined in the 1930s, but according to Stephanie Burt in “The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction”, the digitized fanfic that we recognize today began in 2007 (The New Yorker). Notable for its interactive qualities, fanfic allows writers and readers to mold literary…
