Tag: Jane Austen

Books, Culture

Review: ‘All Stirred Up’ by Brianne Moore

Meha Razdan

Rating: 1.5 out of 5.

The thing with marketing a novel as a retelling is that you’re inviting comparisons to the source material. In the case of successful retellings, this is a great thing — books that can get to the heart of their inspiration and reinvent them are bound to delight readers who are fans of the original work and of the retelling alike. One of the most popular sources for retellings is Jane Austen, whose oeuvre has been mined for everything from zombie movies to Bollywood to Twilight. When done well. Austen retellings become classics in their own right — think Bridget Jones’ Diary or Clueless — but when done poorly, they suffer all the more for having such a beloved source material to pale before.

I was excited going into All Stirred Up because it’s marketed as a retelling of Persuasion, one of my favourite of Austen’s novels. Persuasion, perhaps the original “exes to lovers” angst fest, is fully of enough yearning, pining, and repression to provide excellent fodder to any love story and my friends and I have always searched obsessively for retellings that capitalise on this.

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Books, Culture, films

Can media overexposure harm Jane Austen?

Meha Razdan

I like to think my personality is more than a collection of English student stereotypes, but when it comes to Jane Austen adaptations, I’m not ashamed to say I’m an absolute sucker. To that end, it was only natural that when doing a module on Jane Austen in university last year, I decided to examine the enduring popularity of the Jane Austen adaptations that I and so many others devour and question their effect on the legacy of Austen’s work. I decided to share that essay here!

A quick google search for “most famous english writers” will yield a pantheon of literature’s greatest hits, topped by William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen. The two men have in common long, illustrious careers characterised by incredible breadth of range. Next to them, Austen seems a curious inclusion, her six completed novels and relatively short career making her seem almost an interloper by comparison. And yet there has never in living memory been any doubt cast upon Austen’s position as one of the “greats.” What is perhaps most striking is that her popularity stretches both to the realms of academia and literary criticism, and to that of popular enjoyment — Austen quotes printed on an assortment of mugs and t-shirts and tote bags are ever-popular souvenirs, and Cassandra Austen’s portrait of her sister is now as recognisable an image as the etching of Shakespeare that graces the first folio. 

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