And I'm enjoying it, mainly because I'd always wanted to know a bit more about Darcy's sister -- not to mention the ineffable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, her pathetic daughter Anne, and the detestable Caroline Bingley . It's great fun to see the destinies this author works out for them.
The novel stays reasonably true to Austen's world -- the language is less formal as the book is told through Georgiana's diary and I've been jarred once by an over-modern phrase -- but the book is still great fun. Evidently there are several more -- one of which I've already downloaded . . .
I started thinking about other novels that have taken a minor character and imagined an entire life for them. What with copyrights, the novelist will have to stick to classics -- Moby Dick gave rise to Ahab's Wife, Huckleberry Finn to Finn by Jon Clinch, Little Women to March, Jane Eyre to The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys , Wizard of Oz to Wicked . . . and Neil Gaiman wrote a terrific (and rather troubling) story about the adult Susan -- the one of the four Narnia children who didn't go to Narnia/Heaven at the end of the series.
What are some others? Or who are some minor characters from the classics that you'd like to know more about?
Wouldn't it be fun to see Anne Tyler tackle the later married life of Kate and Petruchio (from The Taming of the Shrew?)
4 comments:
Great food for writers...
it is pretty cool to see minor players get their moment in the sun...and i think it adds depth to the main story to explore them...if they hold true to the feel of the original story
I would sure have trouble with "Miss Birdie and her ..." I guess this genre does require a passage of time from the original. And I absolutely adore Ahab's Wife, by the way!
I generally don't care for authors who expand on another author's work. But I did like Ahab's wife which may in fact be the only one I have read. And perhaps I liked it because I didn't care that much about Ahab anyway. A lover of Neil Gaiman's writing, I might try his book about Susan.
That said, there are a ton of other stories in which I would love to know more about some of the secondary characters. But only if the original author writes them.
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