Darcy” (modeled after the celebrated children’s book “Good Night, Moon”).īut it’s not all fun and games. Griffin doesn’t collect them herself, but has several gifts, including a Jane Austen action figure, a tote bag, and the book “Good Night, Mr. Griffin would even call it an Etsy phenomenon, because there are so many products and decorative items made that are associated with Austen and her novels. There’s a whole Austen industry out there. In addition to the popular book and 2001 romantic comedy, “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” there’s a Bollywood version, “Bride and Prejudice.”

People seem to love to adapt “Pride and Prejudice” into all sorts of genres, from children’s books to zombie movies – yes, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is a real book and horror film. Many of the themes continue to resonate, including how social and family dynamics complicate love and marriage. The class has also spent the semester taking “a global genre tour to investigate how the novel has been adapted, co-opted, misread, ignored, commercialized, rewritten and repurposed,” Griffin wrote in her course description.Īdaptations, she said, give us a chance to reflect on what the plot would look like now, or what it could look like, especially thinking of what issues are left out of the story.

She simply emailed them and asked them if they would participate, and they responded enthusiastically.įirst, the class read “Pride and Prejudice,” Austen’s novel about Elizabeth Bennet and her four sisters – all of marriageable age and whom their mother is trying to match up with the most eligible bachelors in England at the turn of the 19 th century. She happens to know the screenwriter personally, but did not know the other writers, Soniah Kamal and Olivia Waite. It certainly was possible before the coronavirus pandemic to do that, but Griffin said she had not thought to include virtual guests in her course design. She also invited guest speakers virtually to the Zoom classes – two authors of recent adaptations and a television screenwriter. With the diversity of academic backgrounds among students (as opposed to an upper-level course specifically for English majors), Griffin designed a variety of assignments, from literary analysis to script-writing to product marketing. She leads the course online in real time as they explore “what it means to grapple with this text in 2020, a world that looks much different than Austen’s Regency England.” Griffin is teaching a course, “Austen and Adaptation: Pride and Prejudice and Then Some,” to a mix of 60 undergraduates – literature-loving English majors, number-crunching policy analysts and science-driven engineering students.

Eligible pride and prejudice