I’ve been watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a cute little web series that imagines Jane Austen’s best heroine as a graduate student living at home with her parents to save money and avoid taking out further loans:

It’s clearly being shot on a low budget, so the show is unfortunately a bit limited. But I’m struck by the way it’s managed to gracefully make the old text more diverse and more modern. Lizzie’s best friend Charlotte Lucas has become Charlotte Lu, who edits Lizzie’s videos and occasionally stars (quite funnily) as Lizzie’s father. And Mr. Bingley has been turned into Bing Lee, a successful Asian doctor who’s recently bought a nice house in the neighborhood, and has been targeted with laser-like precision by Lizzie’s mother, who is desperate to find prospects for her single daughters in the suburbs. It’s smart, if a little punny, and nod to the demographics of suburbia (I think Suburbia does this okay, too, though it could use some Asian teenagers as well as its gay Asian principal).

The one thing that strikes me as a little off, though, is the way modern Lizzie ribs Lydia about being a slut. Lydia’s character is unpleasant, but the relish the novel takes in packing her off to a miserable marriage is pretty nasty, and a reminder that, no matter how enduring Lizzie Bennet is, Jane Austen was a woman of her time. One of the things that I liked so much about David Liss’s The Thirteenth Enchantment was its compassionate, but not entirely unrealistic, look at the prospects for a woman like Lydia who would have been considered “ruined.” It may be easy to get romantic about Mr. Darcy’s reform. But I have zero nostalgia for the era’s overall sexual politics.

Novelist David Liss likes to send his heroes up against sweeping forces of societal change, whether Jewish boxer-turned-detective Benjamin Weaver is running up against the rise of the stock market and paper money in books like A Conspiracy of Paper and The Spectacle of Corruption or Ethan Saunders is investigating the circumstances surrounding the founding of the Bank of America in The Whiskey Rebels. In his newest book, The Twelfth Enchantment, Lucy Derrick, a young woman with more than a passing resemblance to some of Jane Austen’s most famous heroines, finds her community and her life under threat by the rise of the Industrial Revolution. And Lucy learns that she has the magical talent to stand against some of the more destructive forces at work behind the rise of England’s mills. We spoke about writing political fiction, Austen’s secondary characters, and magic as a social get-out-of-jail-free card. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You’ve written mostly straight historical fiction in the past. How did you decide to make the switch to fantasy?

I’ve always loved genre fiction, and at some point, I knew that I wanted to do something like this. It might be more accurate to say did I decide I wasn’t going to write genre fiction? I got started on a different track…I was in grad school and I decided I want to write a novel. I went with the old adage that you should write what you know. What I knew was 18th century Britain, so what I decided I would do is write a novel based on my dissertation research. For whatever reason, I decided to play it straight and not doing anything paranormal with that book. I’ve always been resistant to being pigeon-holed and being told that because this was the kind of novel I’d written, this was the kind of novel I had to keep writing. I’ve been able to get away with it so far.

Well, even though The Twelfth Enchanment is a fantasy novel, it’s deeply engaged with social issues. It’s always fascinating to me that Austen’s novels, which are very brittle and funny about class, aren’t really engaged with larger social issues.

[There were] two different things I wanted to do. One, which I wrote about in io9, was magic as it was understood in the period. The other thing was I was really interested in was what you were talking about, the narrow view of the Jane Austen novel. She was living in and writing about a period that was going through an incredible economic upheaval that rarely in any way creeps into her books, and then only in the most oblique ways. That was where I began. In terms of the character’s evolution, I guess what I would say is I’m very resistant to writing characters who are contemporary people who happen to be living in the past. I wanted to write about someone who felt to me like a realistic 19th-century character with a realistic set of 19th-century worldviews and interests. To have her start out as someone who is conscious of and aware of and active about these issues never felt realistic to me. Her evolution from apathy to interest I always felt needed to happen in the book, rather than to be introduced to his woman who is a social activist.
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Last week, Paulie asked me in comments on my post about Miss Representation, “Say I’m a stereotypical guy looking to watch/read something new. What stuff written by or starring women am I likely to enjoy?” Here, in no particular order, are 18 things that I think would appeal to men. I’ve omitted classics because I assume you know. All of these, for me, pass Ta-Nehisi’s test in that these are not things you should watch or read out of obligation, but because they’re very good. Got more suggestions? Toss ‘em in comments.

1. Prime Suspect: Helen Mirren is so universally understood to be an amazing actresses, a salty dame, and a foxy lady, that it’s difficult to think about a time when she wasn’t a phenomenon in the U.S. as well as in the U.K. But if you want to understand Mirren’s general awesomeness, it’s worth checking out her seven-season run as DCI Jane Tennison, during which Mirren puts away serial killers, works with immigrant communities, challenges institutional sexism, has affairs and an abortion, and acknowledges her drinking problem. In other words, she’s an actual person rather than a saint, a living illustration of the costs of breaking gender barriers in the working world. And she’s funny, too.

2. Anything Barbara Stanwyck: The woman was tougher than most of the guys she was on-screen with, even in a dress so tight she couldn’t run in it, even in heels that she broke strategically as a way to get back to a mark’s stateroom on a cruise ship. “I love him because he’s a kind of a guy that gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk,” she declared in Ball of Fire. “I need him like the axe needs the turkey,” she glowered about Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve. Stanwyck is the apotheosis of the idea women can be equal — even superior — to men with an entirely different toolkit. Read this profile and critical reassessment of her by David Denby. Then rent The Lady Eve and prepare to die laughing during the mirror scene.

3. Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility: Jane Austen is, indeed awesome, but Emma Thompson is the only woman who possibly could have improved upon her, turning Sense and Sensibility into a pitch-perfect examination of why women get emotionally attached too quickly, or don’t explain why they’re thinking — and how social pressure, particularly when it comes to class and money, leads men into bad decisions. The movie is sharp, very funny, and quite moving. Yeah, it’s Austen and it’s understated, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s boring.
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