Reading the Austen Project

The Austen Project: Jane Austen Re-imagined pairs six bestselling contemporary authors with Jane Austen’s six complete works. I propose to use this interesting (though obviously commercially based) project to return to the intriguing critical issue of Jane Austen’s voice. How do the individual authors, all with established styles and audiences, deal with these demands? Whose voice does the reader hear in the narrative commentary? What is the difference, affectively, between the style and tone of the original novel and that of a contemporary writer who is not writing a pastiche but re-telling the story in modern terms? Equivalences in plot and characters are easy enough to do, and the re-imaginings so far published provide the modern reader with some delighted and/or surprised recognitions. But Austen’s famous irony, her rendition of the heroine’s thoughts from inside but also ‘beside’ the character’s viewpoint, her oblique critiques of her society and its manners – can they be re-imagined and re-rendered successfully?