“It is a truth universally acknowledged¹,” that the glistening pool of Jane Austen Appreciation has, at times, suffered an algaeic build up of–to put it bluntly–crassly commercial schlock. I write not of various film and (shudder) prestige television adaptations, but rather the literary spin-offs that pockmark Ms. Austen’s posthumous complexion; the sophomoric Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, the smooth-brained Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the charming but all too colorful Clueless: The Novelization. This is to say nothing of the audacity of those who would turn Longbourn’s inhabitants into detectives. Properties such as these have allowed the Pop Nerds to mask their Content as Literature, dulling the reading public to the point where supposed “fans” of Austen spend their time posting questions on Reddit like: “Why is Mr. Darcy attracted to Elizabeth & then he says she's ‘barely tolerable’ and ‘not handsome enough to tempt him’ later at the same ball??” ; and “Is Mrs. Bennet Scottish” [sic].
We in the literary establishment have assumed the thankless (unless you count paychecks) mantle of Attendants of the Arts. It is our responsibility to discover and steward exciting and important works, nurturing them from ‘script to shelf. So you can imagine my alarm when the previous editor of this revolutionary discovery, an unpublished rewriting of Austen’s most famous work by her own hand, began to suspect that the work was not authentic but, rather, a piece of fan fiction submitted by two coastal 30-somethings who (though active in a hodge-podge of artistic disciplines) have zero literary accomplishments of which to speak. Were another piece of academic import revealed to be merely Genre Content, we at Penguin (yes this is Penguin) would be forced to merge our noble company with a more suitable purveyor of empty calories, like Kellogg’s. I thus relieved the editor of her duties so that I might see to the matter myself; I have reassigned her to the Non-Fiction Division (let her glut herself on fact-checking and research if she’s such a truth buff!)
I am happy to have done so. It is my professional opinion that Pride & Prejudice: Oops All Marys is most obviously–could only be– Jane Austen’s work. It seems the previous editor, whatever claims she may have made² had not the familiarity with Austen’s private letters and journals to understand what has long been my deeply held belief: Jane Austen, like H.G. Wells or Nostradamus, saw the future with such clarity that she could not help but invent modernity. Passages the previous editor flagged as too-contemporary-to-be-believed are, in fact, further proof of her great genius for innovation. Readers like yourself, of course, will require my editorial perspective to fully process her startlingly colloquial turns of phrase. What you might mistake as a left-field cultural reference from the American 2000s I know to be prophetic suggestions of a world to come, the world we now inhabit; a world with Pokémon.
Let us move forward into this startling work of fiction with renewed vigor and confidence, that it will finally elevate Jane Austen to the level we at Penguin have always believed her to perch: a Master of Futurism. Enjoy Pride & Prejudice: Oops All Marys, Book II.