Do Kids These Days need to be coaxed into picking up a book? What with their new-fangled BookTok and #bookstagram, they seem to be doing plenty of reading all on their own.
But Penguin Random House apparently thinks members of the younger generation need some—ahem—persuasion before they’ll consider cracking open a Jane Austen novel. Or so we might conclude from the latest online kerfuffle: the debate (see, for instance, here, here, here, here and here) about Those Covers.
Earlier this month, Puffin, the children’s book imprint of Penguin Random House, announced its new YA-branded Jane Austen line, coming on March 13 and dubbed—but of course—First Impressions. Each novel is published unabridged and packaged with a new introduction by a popular contemporary YA romance novelist.
The covers are below. Make up your own mind. Don’t let me—ahem—prejudice you.
Yeah, I hate them too.
For my tastes, they’re garish and ugly (that orange-and-pink Pride and Prejudice hurts my eyes), as well as hilariously inappropriate to the novels they allegedly advertise. (“It’s like book catfishing,” one Redditor aptly remarked.) You’ll look in vain for the slightest hint that these stories take place any earlier than, say, 2022.
I can’t decide which is my favorite unfavorite. Emo Edmund Bertram? Captain Wentworth in a man bun? The Dashwood sisters outfitted by a vintage shop in the East Village? That mysteriously pissed-off woman—Jane Fairfax, I guess—who seems poised to stab Emma Woodhouse in the back with a pair of scissors? These belong in the gallery of awfulness that Margaret Sullivan assembled back in 2014, in her entertaining Jane Austen Cover to Cover.
While inappropriate to Jane Austen, however, the covers are entirely appropriate to the aim of the First Impressions project, which is to make Austen look and sound like exactly the same kind of novelist as Ali Hazelwood, Alexis Hall, and the rest of Puffin’s stable of introduction-writers.
“Like all the best romcoms, Austen’s novels are full of meet-cutes, missed connections and drama,” the publicity material insists. “They are masterclasses in the lost arts of stolen glances and breath-taking gestures.” Blurbs for individual novels tell us that Fanny Price “must decide who she loves and how they might all end up living happily-ever-after,” that “Elinor finds her good sense tested by her charming brother-in-law,” and that Anne Elliot “must follow her heart to decide whether to start again or rekindle an old flame.”
All that meet-cute, deciding-who-you-love, and following-your-heart stuff is, of course, straight out of the romance-blurb playbook. It does not, I would argue, have much to do with what Jane Austen is up to. Of course I’m all in favor of convincing young readers to give Austen a try. But does classic literature really require an advertising campaign that makes spiky, complicated works of art sound exactly like a thousand other—usually lesser--books? #IHaveMoreFaithInKidsTheseDays
On the plus side, however, this is possibly the first time in the 214-year history of Sense and Sensibility that anyone has described Edward Ferrars as charming.
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