View attachment 5231387
No. This is not okay. Trans boys didn't exist in Austen's time. Even cross dressing as a male was probably illegal, and if not the family would likely be shunned by polite society. Was open homosexuality even legal in England at the time? I mean obviously there's no homosexuality in this book, but still.
I also have my doubts that a tranny could possibly write a story with the same cleverness and humor that Jane Austen could. Jane throughly understood the rules of her station in life and mocked them, but in a genteel enough manner that wouldn't offend the vast majority of people. At least that's how it appears to this ignorant 21st century Colonial.
I'm both offended and hope to have a Kiwi Book Club about this book. It can't be worse than Manhunt...
So there
were some women in the Regency Era like Theodora Grahn or James Barry who outwardly presented themselves like men;
In Theodora's case, most people clocked her and mocked her for it - the reason we know so much about her is because she was the subject to mean caricatures because she was seen as a weirdo eccentric. James Barry (born Margaret Barry) lived outwardly as a man, because she wanted to be a medical doctor (and indeed performed one of the first ever successful caesarean sections where both the mother and child survived) and her sex was only discovered after she died and had a post-mortem. People also reference Anne Lister ("Gentleman Jack") but she never pretended to be a man, she was just a butch lesbian (and wore dresses, just "masculine" ones).
So it's not
impossible for a woman to have masqueraded as a man in this era, but it does necessitate them effectively distancing themselves from their families and creating a new identity, which rather misses the point of Elizabeth Bennet's character. The summary;
Oliver Bennet feels trapped. Not just by the endless corsets, petticoats and skirts he's forced to wear on a daily basis, but also by society's expectations. The world--and the vast majority of his family and friends--think Oliver is a girl named Elizabeth. He is therefore expected to mingle at balls wearing a pretty dress, entertain suitors regardless of his interest in them, and ultimately become someone's wife.
But Oliver can't bear the thought of such a fate. He finds solace in the few times he can sneak out of his family's home and explore the city rightfully dressed as a young gentleman.
I can
kinda see how you could get to this idea if you only do a very surface level reading (and also change the setting to make it fit - they're countryside aristocrats who cannot afford the London season; they're nowhere near any cities and only briefly visit with relatives). That's putting aside the issue that Lizzy disliking the expectations placed upon women makes her a feminist character, not a man.
I think rewriting classics is creatively barren. You can tell interesting stories set in the same era, but just "remixing" a book feels incredibly lazy. This is actually part of a series called "Remixed Classics" - there's also a Wuthering Heights remix where Heathcliffe and Cathy are both Indian (Heathcliffe is the son of a lascar, which could work, but Cathy is inexplicably mixed race), a Little Women remix where the family are all black, a Treasure Island remix where Jim Hawkins is instead two Chinese girls, a The Secret Garden remix where instead of being a memsahib sent back from the Raj to live in Yorkshire, Mary is in Toronto and gets sent to rural Canada where she meets loads of indigenous people and Dickon Sowerby is a métis girl, a Romeo & Juliet remix where Juliet is a boy named Valentine and Romeo's gay for him etc etc
It feels like these are for people who don't
want to read new books, they want to read the same books they've read already except this time it's QTIPOC so they can shovel the plot beats they're familiar with in like mashed potatoes while enjoying how newly diverse the books are (that or people who refuse to read the classics - the books come with the tagline "authors from marginalized backgrounds reinterpret classic works through their own cultural lens to subvert the overwhelming cishet, white, and male canon").
My only other point of autistic seething is they've put Mr Darcy in an anachronistic "gay victorian vampire bf" outfit. While what they're going for is a Carrick coat with multiple pelerines;
that style is from at least a decade after the setting of Pride and Prejudice. The Carrick coats around at that time were like this:
which look dumpy and weird rather than "dark Academia".
