By Carolyn Brown
In the “Acknowledgments” section of her novel By the Book, Julia Sonneborn describes her first foray into fiction as “a love letter to books” (Sonneborn 361). It truly is, as it closely resembles Jane Austen’s Persuasion in plot and character, but offers more knowledgeable readers a plethora of other literary allusions from the Regency period and beyond to identify and enjoy. That’s not surprising considering the author sets her novel in an English Department on a small campus in southern California.
She includes many academic stereotypes who hold firm to their literary beliefs, from the medievalist chair of the department who peppers his emails with Latin phrases and signs off with a list of his recent publications, which includes editing Piers Plowman and a textbook on early medieval grammar; and a popular professor of Victorian literature who states in absolute terms that he doesn’t read anything published after 1920.
Following the life of a thirty-two-year-old single adjunct professor seeking permanent employment during an academic year works beautifully as a modern parallel to Persuasion, which similarly begins in the fall when Anne Elliot has lost her “bloom,” and ends happily in the spring with marriage and when her looks and situation have much improved. We meet Anne Elliot’s contemporary counterpart, Anne Corey, in early fall at the beginning of the new semester rushing to her first class.
Like Anne Elliot, Anne’s life is messy and challenging: her father is ill and requires her attention; she is trying to finish a manuscript and get it accepted for publication or she will have to leave the college she has called home for the last several years; and she has recently discovered that the former love of her life, Adam Martinez, her Captain Wentworth, has just been named the new president at her institution, the beautifully idyllic Fairfax College (think a picturesque New England school with Victorian architecture – Anne, of course, lives in a garret apartment on the top floor of an old stately home with her cat Jellyby, a Dickensian reference) nestled in the foothills outside of Los Angeles.
All that we expect from Persuasion is present here: our protagonist Anne was (and remains) heartbroken after terminating her engagement to Adam during their graduation weekend at Princeton ten years earlier. Adam had popped the question by placing a ring in an edition of Persuasion in the stacks of the library, but Anne ultimately could not go through with the marriage, having been convinced by her female mentor, aptly named Professor Russell, that marriage could and should wait when she had the opportunity to attend Yale for graduate school.
Anne also knew that her father, who raised her and her sister Lauren after their mother’s death when they were young, would not approve of an early marriage to a young man who had not yet proven his worth. Like Wentworth, when Adam returns, so handsome and, as Anne says, so “presidential” (Sonneborn 22), he is never seen in this novel without a Henrietta or Louisa Musgrove vying for his affection. However, Tiffany Allen and Bex Savage are never serious threats to Anne. It is Anne who does the most damage during the year to her relationship with Adam by taking up with Rick Chasen, a character who has a bit in common with Sir William Elliot, but resembles George Wickham from Pride and Prejudice most strikingly.
That’s what makes By the the Book so fun to read. As much as it is modeled after Persuasion, plot and character resemblances to Pride and Prejudice are also clearly apparent. Rick’s name clearly echoes Wickham, and just like Wickham, he lies from the outset, persuading Anne that his literary accolades were genuinely earned when, in fact, he actually plagiarized and slept with undergraduates. Rick and Adam had crossed paths at an earlier institution, and when they first meet in Sonneborn’s novel, Anne observes the powerful antagonistic look between them that Darcy and Wickham had also shared in Pride and Prejudice.
Rick, like Wickham, gets involved with a much younger woman (Anne’s favorite student, fittingly named Emily Young), in a subplot which functions much like Lydia Bennet’s in Pride and Prejudice. Adam, like Darcy, knows the truth about Chasen; however, unlike Darcy, he withholds what he knows until the truth comes out publicly. There is no letter to Anne from Adam revealing his knowledge about Rick, but Rick’s cowardly behavior mimics Wickham’s, from his last minute absence at the presidential gala to his deceit and lies regarding helping Anne get her book published. Anne, like Elizabeth, blames herself for being blind to signs of his duplicity and for delivering her innocent student into the hands of a predator.
In conclusion, Sonneborn has done a masterful job creating contemporary plot lines that imitate Austen’s originals. From Anne Corey’s declaration in Chapter One that “At Princeton, I was a nobody” (Sonneborn 13), to Adam rescuing her from her nephew’s clutches at the Fairfax fall carnival, to Adam overhearing from Anne’s colleague Larry that she rejected his brother Curtis’s marriage proposal after Adam’s, the parallels to Persuasion are on point and ostensibly clear.
But the novel stands on its own, with original characters like her ailing father who is no pretentious Sir Walter; her BFF and English Department colleague Larry, who is in love with a handsome actor starring in a Jane Eyre/zombies mash-up, and who has the most hilarious lines of the novel; to a hysterical book club scene where Anne has been requested to give background knowledge on Jane Eyre, but not too much because, as her sister says unapologetically, “This is a book club, not Lit 101” (Sonneborn 78). Finally, Sonneborn’s use of emails to end chapters is a brilliant narrative device that moves the plot along smoothly.
All in all, By the Book hits the mark as to what a modern adaptation should accomplish: precise knowledge of the earlier text, but making the subject completely one’s own.
Works Cited
Sonneborn, Julia. By the Book. Gallery Books, 2018.