Juliet Archer

Juliet Archer in The Sunday Times

5th April 2009: All right, all right, I know it’s only a tiny mention …

It’s in an article by Christopher Goodwin and Louis Wise entitled ‘Pride and Prejudice as zombie pulp fiction’. Not exactly what I aspired to with The Importance of Being Emma, but hey!

At the end you’ll find the following paragraph (I’ve put the bit about me in bold):

‘Louis Wise on The Austen Industry

Forget zombies: Austen will soon be contending with aliens, in the film Pride and Predator, funded by Elton John; and vampires, in Michael Thomas Ford’s novel Jane Bites Back. Pride and Prejudice will become a Marvel Comic this year (Marvel has been here before: the Dashwood sisters have hobnobbed with the Fantastic Four) and has been summarised as a series of Facebook updates (“Elizabeth Bennet is ??!!”), not to mention having been staged as a musical several times — a new version should hit Broadway in 2010. The highlight? Lydia Bennet’s I Can’t Resist a Redcoat. Emma, meanwhile, has been updated to The Importance of Being Emma: in Juliet Archer’s novel, our heroine works in marketing, Harriet Smith is her PA and Knightley is   in organics. Amanda Grange has given the men’s side of the story, including Edmund Bertram’s Diary (yawn). You can tuck all your Austen trash into your I Mr Darcy tote — your Austen action figure, Elizabeth and Darcy guest soaps and Jane Austen: Reading Is Sexy T-shirt.’

I promise you, in my version of Emma there’s not a zombie in sight - although with her pale skin Jane Fairfax may be suspected of being a vampire …

Thank you to JF for alerting me!