AS Byatt - clueless

[junediamanti]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "davewitley" 
<dfrankiswork at n...> wrote:
> I heard something on the radio (Radio 4 Today Programme) that I 
> thought might interest some of you.
> 
> AS Byatt has done it again.
> 
> Apparently, some wily American author with an eye for the main 
> chance ('I'm not pretending this is great literature') has 
> published 'Pride and Promiscuity', a version of 'Pride and 
> Prejudice' with the naughty bits left in.

What naughty bits? June shrieked and ran off to flick through her 
copy to see if she could find them.  

The Andrew Davies adaptation on the BBC some years ago featured 
Darby in the bath and Darcy in wet clothes and see through shirt - 
is this it? <g>  - Girls it WAS worth it.

> 
> ASB somehow got wind of this and sounded off on 'Today' about how 
> this was terrible, an insult to the reader's imagination, etc.  (I 
> can't remember the rest.)
> 
> In effect, she has just handed massive free publicity to what is 
> almost certainly run-of-the-mill Austen fanfic.
> 
> So, fanficcers, you can't make a quick buck now, but 50 years 
after 
> JKR dies, you could get lucky and have some pompous person sell 
your 
> wares on a national radio station.

A mainstream writer several years ago wrote a sequel to P&P 
called "Pemberley" and no one shrieked fanfic then (probably because 
the phenomenon that is fanfic barely existed then).  

Sequalling or prequelling the books of others is not entirely 
dishonourable, regardless of what Byatt thinks.  The best known 
example of high class fanfic that I can recall is "Wide Sargasso 
Sea" by Jean Rhys which is a prequel of Jane Eyre - and excellent 
too.  It deals with the youth and life of the first Mrs Rochester - 
the madwoman in the attic, as she grows up in the West Indies.  
Technically fan fic you might say - but decidedly uber fanfic.

So Byatt needs to stop being so sniffy because us fanficcers can 
keep some very high class company indeed!

June