Just over a year ago I wrote in this column about originality and derivation, obviously particularly relating to books. A few days ago I read a Guardian article that looks at this subject from a slightly different angle.
The appetite for Jane Austen seems to be insatiable. Several very good spin off books that I have read lately; Gill Hornby comes to mind and of course very many films. These may be of variable quality and some stray far from the book upon which they are based. Clueless and Emma comes quickly to mind. I find I don’t mind this though as I’m sure it does keep the novels of Jane firmly in the public vocabulary and somehow that must be good.
There has been a plethora of retelling of Greek myths of late, some with a personal agenda, some with a definite feminist angle. Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker and Madeleine Miller come easily to mind and Stephen Fry has recently weighed in with his own version of the Odyssey; a book I have yet to read. How lovely that Greek mythology is in fashion and scrambles its way onto the bestseller lists.
None of this is anything new of course. Shakespeare was a master at drawing heavily on classical stories, Romeo and Juliet was clearly based on Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe and then centuries later West Side Story took its storyline from the Shakespeare play. I wrote about Barbara Kingsolver and her mighty novel Demon Copperhead, lifted straight from Dicken’s David Copperfield and put down in modern day Appalachia.
I think it is all very healthy and very interesting actually. Rewrites of whatever sort offer something new whilst also keeping alive the original classics. Some of these modern writings will of course eventually themselves become the new classics.