Pride and Prejudice with a desi flavour

Title: Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavours
Author: Sonali Dev
Published: May 7, 2019; William Morrow

I almost didn’t read this book because of the goodreads reviews. (Note to readers: don’t go by goodreads reviews, go by my reviews, muahahahaha). Also, I wondered how this book hadn’t popped up on any of the lists I had come across, and I confused it for a long time with Soniah Kamal’s Unmarrigeable.

PP&F (as I’m going to call it) differs from other South Asian retellings because it reverses the genders. Our Darcy-esque figure here is Dr Trisha Raje, daughter of an Indian prince, now settled in California, while Lizzie is DJ Caine, a chef of Anglo-Indian and Rwandan descent, who has quit his job at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris to care for his sister who has been diagnosed with a brain tumour.

By casting Trisha as part of both Indian and Californian royalty – her brother Yash is running for governor – Dev successfully translates the privilege of the 19th C aristocracy. Moreover, Trisha is a neurosurgeon, and her arrogance/confidence in her professional talent has shades of Darcy in Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible. Like Darcy, Trisha is not all arrogance. She is also socially awkward, with a tendency for bluntness.

Being a South Asian retelling, of course, we have the big, fat Indian family, complete with patriarch and Bollywood mother. Trisha has fallen out with His Royal Highness (HRH), her father, because of a teenage transgression involving one Julia Wickham, who compromised her brother’s future. But she has a loving sister and cousins, including one who has visions. The added spice is DJ’s cooking, which seems to have almost magical qualities.

DJ is thrown into Trisha’s path because she is treating his sister, but also because he is catering her brother’s fundraiser. And, of course, they get off to a bad start.

I didn’t expect to like this novel as much as I did. It was very different from the other retellings I’ve read in the past in that the correspondences between the characters and those of the original P&P weren’t evident. But that increased the pleasure when one discovered the resonances.

Also, as I’ve said before, a good P&P retelling brings somethings new to the table. PP&F tackles class and race privilege, and Indian parents’ expectations of their children. We don’t see too much of the typical pressure to marry and settle down, rather, Trisha and her siblings are held up to high standards of achievement and loyalty, expected to sacrifice themselves at the altar of their parents dreams for them, or at least for the eldest brother.

This was the only off note in the novel for me. HRH never really gets his come-uppance; instead, while not exactly succumbing, Trisha seems to accept that she was somehow at fault. Girl no, daddy was completely out of line, both now and then, and I would have liked someone to stick it to him.

Overall, this was a delectable read and I’m looking forward getting my hands on the sequel Recipe for Persuasion.

Of Jane Austen, Cassandra, single life and sisterhood

Title: Ms Austen
Author: Gil Hornby
Published: April 2020, Flatiron

While Jane is the famous Austen, in the family circle, until Jane became famous, Cassandra, as the eldest sister, was a star in her own right. She is known to Janeites primarily as the one who destroyed Jane’s correspondence – Hornby speculates on how and why this might have come about.

Cassandra is now an elderly woman, who descends on the home of a family friend, Isabella Fowle, whose family closely tied to the Austens, to recover the letters Jane wrote to Isabella’s mother. The novel oscillates between the present of Cassandra’s quest and the past of Jane’s early career, and solves some mysteries of literary lore, such as what prompted Jane to accept a proposal of marriage, only to change her mind after one night – and extension some lesser literary questions, such as why did Cassandra herself never marry after the death of her fiance Tom (Fowle).

The obvious explanation of the latter might be that Cassandra was too distraught after Tom’s death to ever consider anybody else, and while that is true (in Hornby’s account), the reasons are more complicated.

These complicated reasons, and Cassandra’s own conviction now at the twilight of her life, that the single life, especially coupled with sisterhood, can be an ideal of its own, influence her reaction of Isabella’s predicament. The rectory, which has been the seat of the Fowle family for decades and the only home Isabella has ever known, will now pass on to a new rector, in the absence of the Fowle heir (“There is no greater menace on this earth than the clergyman, newly appointed”). This mirrors the situation of the Bennets in Jane Austen’s most famous novel, but also that of the Austen sisters themselves, as they were cast out of their family home when their brother took over the rectory from their father.

Cassandra’s sketch of both the pressures on single women to be the taken-for-granted aunt and the joy of building a life with other women offers a much brighter picture of the dreaded “spinster” and alternative possibilities that could have awaited Mary Bennet (in Pride and Prejudice) than those offered by Janice Hadlow in her imagining of the ignored Bennet sister’s life. As she tells Isabella, “Please do not think me to have had a sad life, Isabella. After all, there are as many forms of loves as there are moments in time.”

Indeed Cassandra reflects:

On reflection she could see that the promise [to Tom Fowle] had proved a gift, provided an alibi: It gave her the power to refuse good Mr. Hobday. It led her, through a serpentine route, down many dark and blind alleys, to her own eventual happy ending. So, one could argue, it never had been the willful act of a foolish young woman, but instead the centrepiece of her whole life’s design

Through meditations on her own life, and that of other single friends and relations, Cassandra shows that even in the 19th C, the single life could take different forms and be a fulfilling one. However, she also falls into the trap of assuming that this life will satisfy everyone, if only they could get over their apprehensions, “she had interpreted her own happiness and promoted it, relentlessly, as the only true happiness”.

Yes, it is possible that other happinesses than the one Cassandra envisaged – “a house of three women, and all deeply connected. This was the best possible outcome, the one she had hoped for since her arrival: the Holy Trinity of Domestic Perfection” – but at the end of the book, which turns out to be at its core a tribute to the strength and pleasures of sisterhood, it appears that Cassandra’s vision is the superior one.

Final note: I (very belatedly) watched Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility after this, and I loved it. It is also about women cast out of their family home, building a life together in a cottage, every frame a thing of beauty.

Pride and Prejudice a la Mary

Title: The Other Bennet Sister
Author: Janice Hadlow
Published: March 31, 2020, Henry Holt and Co

Any fan of Pride and Prejudice should read this novel. That is, basically, all

Mary, the geeky middle Bennet sister, has long been ripe for a feminist retelling. At the end of Pride and Prejudice, we are told:

Mary was the only daughter who remained at home; and she was necessarily drawn from the pursuit of accomplishments by Mrs. Bennet’s being quite unable to sit alone. Mary was obliged to mix more with the world, but she could still moralize over every morning visit; and as she was no longer mortified by comparisons between her sisters’ beauty and her own, it was suspected by her father that she submitted to the change without much reluctance.

To my surprise, the Pride and Prejudice retellings that I have read and enjoyed recently chose to go along with Austen and paint Mary in a not very likeable hue. In Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible, the younger Bennet sisters are distinguished by their self-absorption and while Mary’s brand of narcissism differs from that of Lydia and Kitty, in that she has secret, one that is revealed in an ending that somewhat elevates her, she remains essentially an annoying person.

In Soniah Kamal’s Unmarrigeable, Mary is drawn to the more fundamental form of Islam and has a spiteful streak.

Hadlow gives us a Mary we can root for. Yes, she starts of earnest and, true to the original, too apt to reach for an aphorism instead of offering sympathy. But Hadlow’s portrait of the young Mary explains why this is so. What must it be like to be the middle sister, wedged between two paragons of beauty and wit at the top, and two of silliest girls in the country at the bottom, cast as the plain one by a mother who values beauty as the only route to a woman’s salvation?

What must it be like to live with the knowledge that one is likely to be cast in the dreaded role of old maid, destined to spend one’s years with an antagonistic mother? The other Pride and Prejudice character who stared the knowledge of this fate in the face was Charlotte, and Hadlow gives us a clear-eyed but complex portrait of Lizzie’s great friend and, in some ways, Mary’s rival.

In the first half of the novel, Mary is reduced from bouncing from the home of one of her well married sisters to the next, and even seeking solace back at Longbourn, now the property of Charlotte and Mr Collins. Mary, the homebody, who was reluctant to even venture out to the neighbourhood assemblies, finally finds herself (quite literally) in that centre of noise and commerce, London. And in the bustle and anonymity of the city, in a narrative after my own big-city-bedazzled heart, she comes into her own.

Every excellent Pride and Prejudice retelling I have read brings something new to the frame narrative beyond a mere change of narrative perspective or setting. The central problematic of Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha, At Last, is as much about being Muslim in the West as it is about finding a suitable husband. Unmarriageable highlights the abject consequences of family feuds and brings Alys and Darsee together via a shared love of literature. (Sittenfeld’s Eligible does not seem to go further than transposing the dilemmas of the original into contemporary terms, but the wit of her prose elevates the novel).

Hadlow’s undertaking is underlined a weighty question – how to achieve happiness? This is Mary’s quest, even though conventional wisdom tells her that all she must aspire to is survival. Perhaps because of Mary’s intelligence and wide reading, she cannot aspire to such a lowly aim.

A large part of Mary’s quest involves the satisfactory resolution of that most Austenian of premises – sense and sensibility, head versus heart. In Mary’s case, first, she must learn to feel.

Perhaps fittingly, she learns this lesson in the city, in the bustling metropolis of London where she can lose herself in anonymity. It turns out that as some of the more caring adults around her had suggested, Mary needed to escape the shadow of her sisters and her history to find her own voice.

Then, she is introduced to Romantic poetry, the opposite of the rationalism she has prized her whole life. She experiences the sublime.

And she decides that she will not settle.