There’s so much about our modern world that Jane Austen — despite her intelligence and rich imagination — could never have seen coming.
Never mind even wrapping her head around the basic concept of a motion picture — try explaining that her genteel, Regency-era novel about a daughter’s search for a suitable husband has made it to the screen with one minor edit: the addition of flesh-eating zombie hordes.
Are you quite well, Miss Austen? You seem to have caught the vapors.
But sure enough, we now live in the age of “The Walking Dead” and “iZombie,” so it was inevitable that we’d be given “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”
The horror flick, based on the 2009 parody novel, hits theaters Friday and roughly parallels the Austen book’s storyline.
There’s an Elizabeth Bennet (Lily James), one of five unmarried sisters, although here she’s also a martial arts master. There’s a Mr. Darcy (Sam Riley), an upper-crust drip who hunts the undead when he’s not busy selecting a jaunty waistcoat. Will opposites attract as they slash, stab and behead the advancing ghouls?
It’s less the stuff of “Masterpiece Theatre” than drive-in theater. And you gotta wonder what Austen would have thought of all this.
Unless she turns up with a taste for human flesh, we’re out of luck. The English writer died in 1817, and carelessly failed to tackle supernatural monsters in any of her books or letters.
Her descendants, however, are speaking, and if you thought they’d be turned off by the liberties taken in “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” you’d be wrong.
Austen’s heirs are excited about the film. “I will definitely be going to see the movie,” Rebecca Smith, Austen’s great-great-great-great-great-niece and University of Southampton creative writing professor, tells The Post. “I think Jane Austen would have been amused. She enjoyed spoofing things and experimenting with genre.”
“The movie probably won’t come my way. I’ll go to see it if it does, provided it hasn’t had lousy reviews,” says Richard Jenkyns, a University of Oxford classics professor and a distant nephew of Austen’s. (The writer died unmarried and childless, but she did have six brothers, one sister, and 33 nieces and nephews.)
But not everyone is likely to be a fan.
“There are those in the Austen community that do not welcome these kind of adaptations, who feel that it is disrespectful to Jane,” says Caroline Jane Knight, Austen’s fifth-great-niece, who was raised in the same English village, Chawton, as her famous relative. “But I believe that Jane wanted her work to be enjoyed. She wrote for the popular audience of the day and would be thrilled to know that she continues to inspire writers around the world.”
Jenkyns notes the great author’s work is in the public domain and fair game for any sort of adaptation. “Jane Austen belongs to the world,” he says.
And it’s a world that, for better or worse, is also home to the book “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.”