Essex Emma

Novelists haven’t been shy about updating Emma to various walks of contemporary life: We’ve had queer teen Emma, hetero teen Emma, Upper-East-Side-of-New-York Emma, successful-marketing-exec Emma, and Indian-American-social-activism Emma, just to name a few.

Curiously, however, fanfic writers’ enthusiasm for Emma updates hasn’t crossed over to other media. There’s one exception, of course, but it’s the kind of exception that proves the rule: Thirty years after its original cinematic release, Clueless, aka Beverly-Hills-high-school Emma, remains a ubiquitous cultural presence, whether on stage, on TV, or on toy-company websites.

Perhaps it’s the very dominance of Clueless that has scared away potential Emma updaters, who fear their work will inevitably be perceived as derivative, or at least inferior? (For inferior, see under Emma Approved.) A topic for someone else’s dissertation.

Meanwhile, however, it looks as if the Clueless intimidation factor may be weakening: A contemporary Emma update opened earlier this month in London and runs through October 11. This version, by an up-and-coming young playwright named Ava Pickett, sets the story in Essex, an English county whose very name, for the British, evokes blue-collar, down-market, semi-literate, borderline criminal. . . It’s the UK equivalent of, say, 1970s Queens.

An Emma set in a blue-collar, down-market world? If that doesn’t match your vision of the novel, you’re not wrong: According to the pretty-good reviews (see, for instance, here and here), Pickett has boldly changed up Austen’s social world, giving us a working-class Emma who is the first person in her family to attend college, a Mr. Woodhouse who deals in stolen goods, and an Isabella who sports a fake tan.

Throw in references to clubbing and dating apps, plus some Harry Styles on the soundtrack, and you’ve got something that. . . well, it doesn’t sound much like Emma to me, but it could still be fun in its own right.

As were a few moments in the reviews. Like the one that noted, “The book’s complex web of goings-on are streamlined, arguably for the better.” (Excuse me—for the better? I think not). Or the one that noted Pickett’s borrowing of an Austen line (“if I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more”) and concluded, “It is writing of the highest quality.” Well, yes—yes, it is.

Meanwhile, Pickett seems to know perfectly well that she has big shoes to fill—or, if you prefer a different cliché, that she’s standing on the shoulders of giants. Clueless, she told the BBC, is a “masterpiece.”