Pride and Prejudice Fanfiction Crosses all Eras and Genres
The entertainment genre of fan fiction is gaining great popularity. Many great novelists or writers in other mediums created characters and situations that people never tire of visiting. These are authors who are no longer creating their works, so those who have read their original works over and over long for sequels and more stories using the characters and eras they fell in love with. Authors whose original works have generated fan fiction include Margaret Mitchell, Ray Bradbury, Jane Austen and creators of a complete, realistic future such as Gene Roddenberry. Various TV miniseries and hit movies recently on Jane Austen novels have brought in many more new fans to discover her original works and yearn for more stories using her wonderfully interesting and lovable or despicable characters. Imaginative authors abound who have come up with ways to fill this fan need, always making sure they include the characters that the fans most want to see continue.
Some writers have incorporated more modern obsessions, such as the horror genre zombie theme, into the Austen era. Seth Grahame-Smith is the author who managed to incorporate zombies into fan fiction but he did not really create new stories–he just added zombies to already well-known Austen scenes in somewhat contrived manners. He is not the only author who thought Jane Austen fans would enjoy seeing how zombies could work out in the lives of her characters, using them in a “prequel” to one of Austen’s novels, just adding the words “and Zombies” to the classic title and a subtitle, “Dawn of the Dreadfuls.”
The Star Trek TV series did not last all that long compared to many TV shows, yet its popularity lives on in conventions, movies, spin-off TV series more long-lived than the original and hordes of fans who still love the seemingly real future world created by Gene Roddenberry. Many fan fiction sequel novels also hope to capture the ardent interest of “Trekkies.”
“Gone With the Wind” is another novel whose characters and stories are now part of the American fabric, much as Jane Austen’s classics have become. Alexandra Ripley wrote a sequel to the novel, called “Scarlet” to answer some of the questions the novel left readers with after Rhett Butler’s famous exiting line. So powerful is this novel in American literature with the constant references to the characters that the estate of Gone with the Wind’s author, Margaret Mitchell, had to give permission to Ripley to write and publish the sequel. The estate seeks to control all uses of the Gone With The Wind name and theme, filing lawsuits against the publishing of a parody called “The Wind Done Gone” which told the same story from the point of view of a slave. The book was published in 2001, a year after the first attempt to publish it.
Jane Austen’s universal classic appeal can be seen in the numerous eras and generas JA fanfiction now encompasses. If you want to know the definition of a true classic, one need look no further than the fanfictions and novels stretching the boundaries of her characterizations into time travel, zombies and yes, even vampires. If you are a classic Jane Austen purist, how about a more traditional Regency Pride and Prejudice fanfiction? One of my favorites is Gaby A.’s Lost in the Deep which tells the story of how Georgianna Darcy, comes to find true love in an unexpected place.
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