Pride and Prejudice and Dragons in Heartstone
It is a truth universally acknowledged that adding dragons to Pride and Prejudice is the best idea I’ve heard in a while. Heartstone, the debut novel of Elle Katharine White, is not set in a Regency England augmented with dragons (like His Majesty’s Dragon, by Naomi Novik), but in a new fantasy world in which the events of Pride and Prejudice (translated, of course, to the needs of this new paradigm) play out, more or less. I don’t consider myself a hardcore Janeite (though this may be coy dissembling; I have some opinions about Jane Austen, and they tend to be high-pitched), but I was well pleased by the shifts and changes to Austen’s classic.
Which is not to say that updating beloved classics isn’t a fraught prospect. Die-hards can grow wroth indeed over what they perceive as encroachment on their property. People who don’t know or care about the source material, well, don’t know or care, which means the reimagining must stand on its own, absent reader sentimentality. In short, the work has access to all the strengths of the source material, but also all its weaknesses. But it must not create more of its own.
Aliza Bentaine lives in a backwater province with a gryphon problem. The beasts have already killed one of her four sisters (poor Kitty), and have generally been ravaging the good people and livestock of this small community. Lord Merybourne hires Riders (more or less a soldiering class, bonded with dragons and their ilk) to come and clear his county of the gryphon threat. Enter Alastair Daired, his best friend. and sister, and another battle-worn couple into the small town. Aliza and Daired meet cute over the mud-throwing antics of some hobgoblins, and we are off and running into a draconic version of Austen’s most enduring work.
I’d argue that the most difficult aspect of any Pride and Prejudice update is the marriage plot. Women aren’t required to “marry well” to make their way in the world anymore. Sure, an author can construct a world in which this is still the case, but I think that is something of a dodge; acknowledging the modernity of the audience is much cooler. In Heartstone, Aliza’s mother Mrs. Bentaine is absolutely obsessed with her daughters’ potential marriageability, but it’s more a personal eccentricity than a widespread social mandate. Aliza has her own competences within this world, like a practiced hand at herbology, so she and Alastair meet on something like equal footing, despite their wildly different upbringings and experience.
White follows Austen nearly beat for beat, from the supercilious cousin to the duplicitous romantic rival. Of course, the characters change, but their updates and translations made me smile. I’ve always had a shine for Mary, who, other than her hidebound sectarianism, seemed to get the short end of the stick from Jane. Here, she’s a sort of Neville Longbottom character, versed in arcana that Aliza isn’t. The marriage between Aliza’s best friend and the supercilious cousin, which felt like such a blow in Pride and Prejudice, is given a slightly different spin here in this draconic world.
One of the more enduring criticisms of Pride and Prejudice is that, while the plot of Austen’s novel occurs during the Napoleonic wars (or, at least, in the interregnum between hostilities), there’s very little acknowledgment of the dangers of the battlefield or the effects of violence on its soldiers. In Heartstone, we see this many times over, from the grief of a sister who lost one of her own, to the ugly blood of hand-to-hand combat, to the expectant terror a soldier trying to hold the line.
This is an engrossing update of a beloved classic, spinning the old into something new. And honestly, given the richness of this world, I’d love to see White venture out from under the shadow of Austen, and into all the potential of these dragons taking wing.
Heartstone is available now.