Article · Book ListAusten Retellings That Actually Hold Together

While Elizabeth and her sisters fuss over balls and husbands, Sarah, the Bennets' orphaned housemaid, is starting to chafe against the limits of her class. Then a new footman arrives under mysterious circumstances.

This holds together beautifully, because it doesn't need an equivalent: it simply turns round and looks at the people Austen's world depended on. All that laundry had to be washed by somebody. The class pressure runs through every page, and it's stronger here than in the original.

Best for

readers who want Pride and Prejudice from below stairs

Holds together

strongly

Alys Binat has sworn never to marry. A scandal has wrecked her family's fortune and marriage prospects, and she's found happiness teaching English literature to schoolgirls in Pakistan, many of whom will leave to marry before they graduate. Then she meets Mr. Darsee at a wedding.

Austen in a society where a daughter's marriage prospects are still a family's financial future. The pressures don't need translating because they never went away, and that's what makes it work.

Best for

readers who want the closest match to Austen's stakes in a modern setting

Holds together

strongly

Ayesha has set aside her dreams of poetry for a teaching job, to pay off her debts to a wealthy uncle. She lives with her lively Muslim family in Canada, doesn't want an arranged marriage, and is irritatingly attracted to Khalid, who is as smart and handsome as he is conservative and judgmental.

Now this is how it's done. It's a loose retelling, with family, faith and community doing the work that class and money do in Austen, and it's funny and heartbreaking by turns. It has flaws, and they stand out precisely because so much of it is so good.

Best for

readers who want a warm, funny contemporary with real cultural texture

Holds together

strongly

Liz is a magazine writer in her late thirties living in New York. When their father has a health scare, she and her sister Jane go home to Cincinnati and find their Tudor house crumbling and their family in chaos: Kitty and Lydia are too busy with CrossFit and Paleo diets to get jobs, and Mary is on her third online master's degree.

Here the pressure is money and a family in decline, which is exactly right. And Sittenfeld is sharp enough to make the Bennets' modern failings as funny as Austen's.

Best for

readers who want a satirical, grown-up modern retelling

Holds together

mostly

London, 1812. Oliver Bennet feels trapped, not only by the corsets and petticoats he's forced to wear, but by the expectations of a world that thinks he's a girl named Elizabeth, who's meant to attend balls, entertain suitors and become someone's wife.

This one keeps Austen's period and sharpens its central pressure: if marriage is a trap for Elizabeth, it's a different and deeper trap for Oliver. The social logic doesn't just survive, it gets heavier.

Best for

YA readers who want a queer, trans reimagining

Holds together

strongly

Lydia tells the real story. Kitty is actually a barn cat (and Lydia's familiar), Wickham is exactly as wicked as everyone believes, because he's a demon, and Mr. Darcy's feelings about magic make his feelings about etiquette look relaxed.

Does it hold together? By its own rules, yes, which is all a good fantasy retelling needs: magic has costs, and Lydia's choices have reasons. It's simply delightful. I've always wanted Lydia to get the spotlight, and this is very nearly the book I'd have asked for.

Best for

readers who want Austen with a wink and a wand

Holds together

mostly, by design

Generations after a genetic experiment went wrong and decimated humanity, a nobility that outlawed most technology rules what's left. Four years ago, Elliot North refused to run away with Kai, her childhood sweetheart and a servant, and chose her family's estate instead. Now the estate is failing, and she has to rent land to a fleet of shipbuilders that includes a famous explorer called Captain Malakai Wentforth: an almost unrecognisable Kai.

This is the best example on the list of what I mean. It builds a whole new class system so that Persuasion's central choice, duty over love, makes sense all over again. It's science fiction that does the social work.

Best for

YA readers who want Persuasion with real stakes

Holds together

strongly

Series

book one

Engagement season has arrived, and eighteen-year-old Princess Leonie, heir to a faded European spaceship, needs to marry money: her father and sister are about to spend the last of the family fortune, and without money she can't patent her latest invention. Then her childhood friend and first love comes back.

A princess forced to marry for money is Austen's pressure moved into space, and the money problem is spelled out on the first page.

Best for

YA readers who'd enjoy Persuasion crossed with a dating show

Holds together

mostly

Emma Woodhouse is beautiful, clever and rich, and has spent her twenty-three years on the Upper East Side with very little to trouble her, until her matchmaking gets her sister married off and moved away. Bored in her final year of grad school, she takes on a new project: Nadine, a wide-eyed Ohio transplant.

Emma travels better than most of Austen, because a rich young woman with too much time and a matchmaking habit needs no translating at all. The setting is closer to Clueless than to Highbury, and it doesn't pretend otherwise.

Best for

readers who want a light, fun modern Emma

Holds together

mostly

Series

book one of For the Love of Austen

At the reading of her father's will, Nora finds out she's his secret child. With her sensible reputation already wrecked by a viral video, all she and her free-spirited sister have left is a rundown inn in the middle of nowhere, which they have to fix up before Labor Day or lose.

Two sisters with no money and one asset they can't afford to lose: that's Sense and Sensibility's pressure, intact. And it's a lot steamier than Austen.

Best for

readers who want a spicy modern romance with an Austen spine

Holds together

mostly