Retellings of classic novels are having a bit of a moment: both Sandra Newman’s feminist take on Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julia, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer-winning modernised David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead have made a splash in the last couple of years, while Percival Everett’s reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James, will hit bookshops in April.
If each work of art builds on what came before it, the novels below take indebtedness to the next level. With riffs and rewritings, playful challenges and prequels, these writers re-imagine the stories that inspired them – and allow us to rethink the idea of novelty itself. After all, as WH Auden puts it, our belief in our own “uniqueness” is “absolutely banal”.
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The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Spinning Virginia Woolf at least three ways, Cunningham’s Pulitzer-winning novel tests the ways in which fiction forms part of our reality. In one timeline, an unhappily married housewife reads Mrs Dalloway. In another, a woman called Clarissa plans a smart Manhattan party. The world of the Bloomsbury writer, as she composes her modernist day-in-the-life story, haunts the remaining chapters. Structurally brilliant, melancholy, and sharply edged.
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On Beauty by Zadie Smith
In 2007, Smith’s debut, White Teeth, was framed as a modern classic of kinds, reissued in Penguin’s orange retro-livery. On Beauty, a campus-based transatlantic homage to EM Forster’s Howards End, asks why art objects become seen as “classics” in the first place – and presses on the powerful structures that keep such works in place. Combining vivid characters with philosophical riffs on high art and hip-hop, this exploration of class, race and family asks how we might “only connect” in the 21st century.
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Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
A passionate, feminist prequel to Jane Eyre, Rhys’s final novel gives a voice to the madwoman in the attic. Before she became Bertha Mason, Rochester’s first wife was we learn, the beautiful, troubled Antoinette Cosway. Dramatic and painterly, Rhys’s narrative captures the beauties of the landscape of Jamaica, Cosway’s childhood home, as well as the ugliness of historical guilt and complicity. Groundbreaking on its publication in 1966, Wide Sargasso Sea has lost none of its charge.
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Dispossession: A Novel of Few Words by Simon Grennan
In a series of miniature tableaux, this gorgeous graphic novel takes on Trollope’s 1879 work, John Caldigate. It’s the usual 19th-century fare: indebted hero travels to Australia to make his fortune, but ends up accused of bigamy – though Grennan’s take is quite out of the ordinary. Dispossession playfully and skilfully interrogates the Victorian novel. A bonus for readers: versions of well-known 19th-century works of art are hidden among the quadrillage, like a wonderful kind of Where’s Wally.
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Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
Retired doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, is obsessed with works of Gustave Flaubert. But gradually, his diligent accretion of details about Flaubert’s fiction reveal themselves as a carapace – and a way of avoiding his own reality. The layers of this brilliant love story lift painfully, with the ghost of Flaubert’s most famous heroine, Madame Bovary, drifting beneath the surface. Flaubert’s Parrot doubles back on itself so many times it feels like a corridor of mirrors. But you’re left, in the end, not with emptiness, but with a feeling of generous, sorrowful yearning. “Books”, Braithwaite bleakly reflects, “make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”
