Photo by Héctor J. Rivas on Unsplash

If there’s one thing that romance has in abundance, it’s Austen retellings. Specifically, Pride and Prejudice retellings. Which is why I was extra delighted to pick up Camille Kellogg’s modern sapphic take on P&P, Just As You Are, and find that it breathed some new life into familiar romance territory. Reading this text also got me thinking more broadly about what makes a successful retelling. What does it entail, besides repurposing plot beats and character dynamics? How can a good retelling balance innovation and faithfulness to the original? And what does adaptation tell us about how readers relate to the fictional worlds they read? So that’s today’s topic.

The spoiler level here today is very low, so feel free to read on even if you haven’t (yet) picked up Kellogg’s delightful book. Here’s some basic info:

What’s often missing from P&P retellings – and what Kellogg’s book gets very right – is the complicated relationship between social class, respectability, and desire. Retellings of Austen’s classic will usually show that Darcy is rich and Lizzie is not; they will often present Lizzie as lacking a certain social polish and Darcy as a grump, and these differences of temperament will somewhat get in the way of their romance. But really, it’s the socially conditioned relationship between these elements that matters most: the era, milieu, and moment that Lizzie and Darcy live in allow them (and the reader) to understand subtle class-based cues about what is seen as respectable, which in turn affects how they judge their own and others’ desirability as a partner. This relationship plays out in Just As You Are rather cleverly, through its treatment of clothing and gender expression among sapphic women in modern New York City.

By focusing on how Just As You Are uses clothing, I don’t mean to suggest that’s the only place where class and conformity and desire show up in this book (or, for that matter, in other Austen retellings: I would be remiss not to mention Fire Island as another very different take on P&P in specifically cis gay male social circles). But I think the way clothing, in particular, allows Kellogg’s novel to explore the nexus of gender, wealth, social pressure, and desire is really unique. And can probably be best explained through a close reading of a single scene: in which our heroine Liz (Elizabeth Bennett!) has dinner with her boss Daria (Darcy!), Daria’s uptight rich aunt Katherine (Lady Catherine de Bourgh!) and Daria’s ex-girlfriend Caroline (Caroline Bingley!)

To set the scene: Liz is on a work trip to Boston to conduct an interview. She has a job in NYC writing about sex and intimacy and other non-“respectable” topics for the queer online magazine Nether Fields. Accompanying her is Daria, joint-owner and investor in the struggling online magazine. This work trip ends up involving an unannounced trip out for dinner to celebrate the birthday of Daria’s aunt Katherine. The dinner party is – as anything involving a stand-in for Lady Catherine de Bourgh must be – absolutely excruciating. Especially when Daria’s ex Caroline shows up.  But before we get to that, let’s take a quick look at what everyone’s wearing over the course of the scene:

Katherine (before dinner):

She was white, with gray hair pinned into an elaborate bun. She wore a creamy, expensive-looking scoop neck blouse with a string of pearls and a navy cardigan despite the summer humidity.

Katherine (for dinner):

Katherine came into the room, wearing a conservative turquoise dress with a gray shawl.

Daria:

Daria was wearing a gray, tight-fitting suit with a white shirt and a red tie with a matching pocket square. 

Caroline:

She was wearing a silver dress that plunged at the neckline- Liz had to focus to keep herself from looking too closely at her cleavage. Her hair was blown dry, her makeup was impeccable, and her nails matched her dress. Liz hated her.

Liz (before dinner):

She was wearing industrial-looking gray work pants and a black T-shirt with her black Doc Martens. It was more butch than Liz’s usual taste, but the outfit gave her a bit of swaggering confidence that she thought would help with the interview. She hadn’t considered that she’d be meeting Daria’s aunt in her outfit choice. 

Liz (for dinner);

At six forty, Liz went downstairs. She was wearing the most femme outfit she’d brought – tight black jeans and a button-down shirt. She had a feeling that Daria’s aunt would have preferred a dress, but Liz hadn’t thrown a lot of fancy dining options into her bag. 

So obviously, there’s a lot going on here. First, and perhaps most apparently, is the fact that Daria, Caroline, and Katherine all wear clothes with markers of wealth – silver, fitted, expensive-looking clothes, with pearls or a matching tie and pocket square – that are socially appropriate for a dinner party. Liz, in both instances, is dressed in a way that reads too casual, but she doesn’t have access to the supposedly-appropriate clothing: both immediately, because she didn’t pack it, and more generally, because she can’t afford it as a writer for a small online magazine living in New York City.

 What interests me the most, though, is the way that wealth works along with gender to code the respective “appropriateness” of each of these outfits. Daria and Caroline – both queer women – are dressing themselves within gender-binary models. Caroline subtly echoes Katherine’s “rich white lady look”: trading a cream scoop-neck blouse for a silver plunging neckline, an elaborate bun for an equally time-consuming blow-out. High femme, high cost, and high maintenance. Daria, in turn, is dressed along traditionally masculine lines in a suit and tie: likely bespoke, given the fit. There’s an interesting backstory to this aspect of Daria’s personal style. A couple of chapters earlier, she talks about going into finance because she wanted to dress like the men who worked in that sector, and to command respect the way they did. Yet she lacked female models (like Caroline has in Katherine) for how to do so. Thus she’s ended up in a financially lucrative, respectable, and male-dominated job, which has enabled her to express her gender identity in a way that feels right to her, and is – at least comparatively – read as “right” for a dinner party, conforming as it does to previously established binary forms of dress. Though this sartorial emulation is, of course, not without its difficulties and emotional costs. 

Placing Liz on this axis – where both personal wealth and proximity to gendered models of expensive dress allow Daria and Caroline to meet societal expectations – produces some really interesting results. Liz indicates throughout the book that she doesn’t feel at home in either femme or masc clothing, and instead moves fluidly between the two. This is not just experienced by Liz as an identity crisis, but also as a financial one: it requires her to have two separate wardrobes, and to be able to bring two sets of clothing with her wherever she goes. The only piece of individual clothing that feels androgynous enough on its own is an expensive blazer gifted to Liz by her problematic crush Weston (Wickham!), once again asserting how much money is tied up in both social “acceptability” and self expression in the world of this novel.

This level of specificity is, for me, what makes Just As You Are so successful as a Pride and Prejudice retelling. Communicating that Elizabeth and Darcy are operating in a broader social and economic structure that dictates how they present themselves, how others see them, and how they see themselves is obviously important, but so is the fact that said structures are quietly expressed through small details. Like any other kind of world-building, creating this structure through clothing in a modern retelling of P&P means paying attention to details that are appropriate to the universe the characters live in, as well as ensuring that they’re legible to modern readers. 

When it comes to good retelling, of course, there’s a question not just of similarity to the original, or transposition of its primary themes, but also significant differences. This, I think, is where the question of “desire” comes into play, and how it works in an Austen novel vs. a contemporary queer romance. In Austen’s original, a primary function of desire relies on the marriage plot: wealth and respectability combine to create the conditions for a desirable marriage. Which isn’t to say that Lizzie and Darcy’s romantic desire for each other doesn’t matter, but rather that “desirability of marriage” remains an important external element pushing events along. Part of the reason Elizabeth Bennett’s social class standing matters is that it represents a significant impediment to romance, because making an advantageous and socially acceptable marriage remains crucial in the world of the novel.

That’s always been one element of the original text that, to my mind, has a difficult time making the leap to contemporary romance. I don’t mean to imply that class pressures and ideas of respectability don’t play into our understanding of a desirable marriage in 2024, but they do differ meaningfully in both intensity and scope from Austen’s day. For Daria to be sympathetic to modern readers, she rightly isn’t shown as placing Austen-levels of weight on social class or gender expression when it comes to who she wants to date. (Side note: Liz’s job writing listicles about sex toys for an online magazine does some of the “respectability” work here, in ways that dovetail really nicely with a broader exploration of the value of pleasure, including in romance novels themselves.) However, when it comes to the main theme of this blog post – how social class relates to gender and desire – Kellog’s novel is interested less in whether Liz will be desirable to Darcy for those reasons, and more interested in how Liz desires to live in the world and express herself. Liz figuring out how to express gender through clothing, and accept herself despite society’s strictures, is a journey of personal desire, and brings some entirely new material to Austen’s classic. 

It’s this addition of a modern queer take on gender expression that keeps this novel feeling fresh, and in dialogue not just with Austen, but also with its contemporaries. I would posit that Austen’s novels are concerned with the collective, the external, and the social to an extent that differs from current romance novels, which tend to place a comparatively heavier emphasis on internality and individual identity expression. The fact that Liz’s clothing also represents a personal journey towards accepting her own gender expression – one that exists outside of what anyone else in the novel feels about it – is not a whole-cloth (see what I did there?) addition to Austen’s novel, but rather a subtle shift in emphasis that brings Just As You Are in line with current trends in contemporary romance. Of course, whether the shift away from the collective and towards individuality is itself a product of late-stage capitalism, and thus still related to class issues, is probably a topic for another post! In any case, the novel speaks to modern readers not just because it draws our ability to discern the varying levels of appropriateness of a scoop-neck dress, a tailored women’s suit, and a pair of jeans at a dinner party. It also speaks to what we look for in queer romance in 2024, including strong individual growth arcs and sensitive explorations of gender identity. Which makes Just As You Are a very successful retelling indeed.