I feel that I understand both fondness and snobbiness toward the Midwest, and it was fun to inhabit my characters' various viewpoints. I've lived on both coasts and in different parts of the Midwest, so I was especially interested in exploring coastal-Midwestern tensions (or, you might say, coastal-Midwestern pride and prejudice).
How did you leverage that connection to place in building and updating their characters?
But I thought what it shared with a small nineteenth-century English village was that outsiders might imagine it as dull, while inhabitants would know that juicy, complicated events were always under way there, as they are everywhere.Įach of your characters associates themselves with a particular place-Lizzie and Jane identify in some ways as New Yorkers, Lizzie in particular has an appreciation for Cincinnati, and Darcy has strong ties to the Bay Area. And I actually grew up in Cincinnati, though I've never lived there as an adult. As an American, I think they always assumed I'd set mine in the United States. I wrote Eligible after I was invited by two British editors to be part of what they were calling The Austen Project-assigning six contemporary novelists to tell present-day versions of each of Austen's six novels. Why did you choose to set Eligible in the United States? How did you select Cincinnati in particular? The English countryside is an iconic setting for Jane Austen’s stories. I had the opportunity to ask Sittenfeld a few questions about why she chose these locations as the setting for her book and what historic places are important to her. (I mean, it is pretty hard to compete with Mr. What I didn’t expect was how the places where Sittenfeld chose to set her story would capture my imagination her vivid descriptions of the various Cincinnati neighborhoods and the lush expanse of the grounds of the Bay Area-adjacent Pemberley captivated me almost as much as the characters did. I was even more excited to read Eligible after a friend told me that my employer, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, makes a cameo appearance as the potential future steward for Pemberley, the fabled Darcy family home.Īs expected, I loved the book. As a longtime Jane Austen fan, I was already looking forward to reading Eligible, a new novel by award-winning writer Curtis Sittenfeld based on Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice.
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