No book series could be both so unnecessary and yet so inevitable as the "Austen Project," which, beginning with Joanna Trollope's "Sense & Sensibility" (Harper, 362 pages, $25.99), will bring out "reimaginings" of Jane Austen's six canonical novels. Why does Ms. Trollope need such a fancy imprimatur? Writers have been exhaustively reimagining Austen's fictional worlds for years in an unstoppered gush of adaptations, prequels, sequels, modernizations and alternate narratives. Her characters have starred in board books for babies and fan-fiction erotica. Her settings have been the site of zombie invasions and murder mysteries (including by eminences like P.D. James). And this doesn't even take into account the cottage industry of Austen-themed self-help books, dating manuals, travelogues, recipe collections and social-science monographs—or the critical studies that try vainly to explicate the international infatuation.
Amid such a flourishing garden, Ms. Trollope's "contemporary retelling" is a rather drab shoot. Just as the title is unchanged (save for the ampersand—some kind of nod to modern times?), the characters keep the original names and play out an identical drama: Thoughtful and guarded Elinor Dashwood and her impulsive sister, Marianne, fall in love with compromised men, console each other when their hearts are broken and are finally rewarded with happy endings.
MIchael Witte
Ms. Trollope's present-day updating offers novelties like text-messaging and YouTube scandals, as well as the frisson of seeing Elinor utter mild profanities. But the writing isn't so much modernized as simplified, like those Shakespeare editions for grade-schoolers that provide colloquial "translations" on facing pages. Egged on by her rakish suitor, John Willoughby, Marianne in Austen's original cruelly gibes at her principled but unglamorous admirer, Col. Brandon, saying: "Add to which, that he has neither genius, taste, nor spirit. That his understanding has no brilliancy, his feelings no ardour, and his voice no expression." In Ms. Trollope's version this becomes: "He's not a fruitcake. He's just very, very dull."
The book's halfhearted rendering seems ominous for the series as a whole. However absurd the profusion of Austen homages may have become, most of the adapters have been genuine Janeites, whose zeal infused even the silliest spinoffs with charm and personality. With the Austen Project, a spontaneous movement looks to have become officially franchised. This puts it in league with recent cynical estate-commissioned sequels such as William Boyd's 007 novel, "Solo," or Sebastian Faulks's Wodehouse pastiche, "Jeeves and the Wedding Bells," about which the best you can usually say is that they don't manage to spoil your enjoyment of the original.
It would be a pity if the taint of commercialization stopped readers from picking up Jo Baker's intelligent and elegantly written "Pride and Prejudice" adaptation, "Longbourn" (Knopf, 331 pages, $25.95). Ms. Baker's novel is about the Bennet family's household staff—Longbourn is the family home—particularly a housemaid named Sarah, whose love affair with a newly arrived servant takes place simultaneously against Elizabeth's courtship and marriage.
Through the brief quotations from "Pride and Prejudice" that open each chapter, Ms. Baker makes it clear that maids, cooks and footmen are omnipresent in the classic and yet are taken for granted not only by the Bennets but by Austen herself. From the point of view of their overworked help, even Austen's most lovable heroines cannot escape appearing cosseted and self-regarding (more heretically, "Mr. B." is implicated in a paternity scandal). Ms. Baker at times belabors the quotidian unpleasantness whitewashed in Regency romances—we regularly find Sarah rinsing soiled linens or emptying chamber pots. But the emotional imbalance between upstairs and downstairs is affecting. Darcy, in his famous declaration to Elizabeth, called love a force that left him "properly humbled." But to Sarah, who has had humbling enough for a lifetime, it's the distant promise of fulfillment and self-worth.
Her elusive interest, an enigmatic ex-soldier named James Smith, widens the perspective of the story even further. Although the visiting militia in "Pride and Prejudice" exists purely to tantalize the foolish younger Bennet daughters, Ms. Baker reminds us that they were veterans of ugly battles in the era of Napoleon. To James, the cozy world of the Bennet family is marked by an "innocence as deep and dangerous as a quarry-pit." "Longbourn" reveals these messy backdrops while still, in fitting tribute, inventing a touching love story of its own.
Ronald Frame's "Havisham" (Picador, 357 pages, $26) is the kind of adaptation that expands on the story of one of a classic's peripheral characters, an immensely popular form that includes books like Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" (about the first marriage of Mr. Rochester from "Jane Eyre") from 1966 and Geraldine Brooks's "March" (about the father of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women"), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Here Mr. Frame fills the gaps in the life of Catherine Havisham, the duplicitous benefactress who first appeared in "Great Expectations" as an old crone wearing a wedding dress and grimly bragging of a broken heart.
In Dickens's novel, Abel Magwitch explains most of Miss Havisham's circumstances, so there aren't many gaps that need filling. Raised the stuck-up daughter of a wealthy brewer, she fell in love with the roguish Charles Compeyson. But after Compeyson scams and jilts her, she becomes a half-mad shut-in, keeping company only with her ward, Estella, the abandoned child of a felon.
Mr. Frame adds a few curlicues to the tale, having Miss Havisham constantly quote from Virgil's "Aeneid," especially the verses about the spurned queen, Dido. Allusions to Dickens are similarly cute. Late in the novel, when Pip begins to visit, she remarks on his humility: "This boy had no such expectations." The breathless, operatic nature of the writing ("Anything. He might ask anything of me and I'd do it. All for love.") is a reminder that much of Dickens's brilliance was in caricature. His side characters don't fare well when given center stage.
Minae Mizumura's "A True Novel" (Other Press, 854 pages, $29.95) is a fascinating example of a cross-cultural adaptation. In one of the sizable passages of meta-commentary that frame the narrative, the author explains that the rewriting of Western novels has been "a central project in the modern literary history of Japan." Here she tells a story that is a mix of "Wuthering Heights" and "The Great Gatsby."
It centers on the magnetic Taro Azuma, recounting his bumpy rise in postwar Japan. In the highlands of Karuizawa (since converted to a popular resort town), the orphan Taro is taken in by a family of servants and supported by the aristocratic Saegusa clan. A perpetual outsider because of his low rank and half-Manchurian bloodline, he has no friends except Yoko, the sickly daughter of his employers. But though the two are in love, Yoko rejects Taro for a husband with better prospects. The spurned youth moves to Long Island and works his way up from chauffeur to "the most successful Japanese businessman in America." Despite his wealth, he moves back to the decaying cottage of his childhood, intent on reclaiming Yoko.
Ms. Mizumura's writing, smoothly translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, doesn't have anything close to the pitched intensity of Emily Brontë's, though her depiction of Taro contains elements of Heathcliff's consuming resentment: "His youth was no longer fresh and vigorous," she writes of Taro when Yoko throws him over, "but had settled like a thick sediment, with a stale smell to it." When, years later, Taro tries to lure a married Yoko to live with him in a mansion on Long Island's north shore built early in the 20th century by an "American nouveau riche," he summons the restless apparition of Jay Gatsby. Still, in many ways Taro seems more representative than specific, a means of tracing the changing fortunes in Japan after World War II, particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the chaotic ascendance of new money.
Adding to the broad-canvas effect is the book's peculiar nested format. The narrator is Ms. Mizumura (or a character by that name), who has heard the story from a traveler to Karuizawa who heard it from Taro's housekeeper. This convoluted structure allows the author to present the events that unfold as though they were a real-life chronicle of obsession and tragedy that marvelously takes the shape of great literature. "A True Novel" suggests that it isn't only writers who are influenced by timeless novels but also the forces of history itself.