Non-Canon Compliant: In Praise of Classic Lit Fan Fiction

Classics fan fiction is everywhere you look right now, and I for one am beyond excited about it. You still might not see the term on endcap displays in your local bookstore, as words like “retelling” or “reimagining” are generally considered more highbrow. But I’ve been on the fandom side of the internet for two decades now, and you can’t fool me. Huckleberry Finn fic won the 2024 National Book Award, and David Copperfield fic won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. I know what I read.

If we strip away the baggage attached to the concept of fan fiction, the basic definition is this: using an existing media property as a springboard for new art, often borrowing characters and plot elements from the original to spin up new stories. And that practice is virtually as old as publishing itself. As Tumblr loves to remind us, The Divine Comedy is self-insert Bible fic. West Side Story is 1950s AU Romeo and Juliet fic. Are half of Shakespeare’s comedies Orlando Furioso crossover fic? I say yes.

Clearly there’s some itch in the human psyche that’s best scratched by picking up a piece of media and taking it apart to see what’s under the hood. For me at least, that itch has two parts. You have to deeply love a particular piece of media. And, crucially, something in that media has to bother you.

“Fan” is part of the phrase “fan fiction” for a reason: it’s hard to write fic for something you don’t love. You have to spend too much time inhabiting someone else’s fictional world in a way that’s more labor-intensive than simply consuming it as a reader or viewer. But at the same time, if the original did everything you wanted, why would you feel the need to imagine it differently? To transform perfection is by definition to lower its quality; to transform something imperfect is to celebrate its beauty while holding its flaws up to the light.

Fic writers transform and explore imperfections in countless creative ways. Building out a secondary character. Imagining a scene that might have been included but wasn’t, or replaying canonical scenes from a different perspective. Trying out alternate endings, or placing characters in different situations to see how they react. Excising the thorn of prejudice or bigotry from a text where it’s baked in, to see what could emerge in its place.

At its best, fan fiction is a celebration and an interrogation of the media that shapes us. It’s a joyful opportunity to let the experience of consuming something we love stretch out a little longer. In the same moment, it’s a critique and a transformation. What ideas or perspectives weren’t included in the original? What would it look like if they were?

Fan fiction of classic literature fulfills this function of active, engaged critique in an especially direct and powerful way. Instead of transforming the canonical characters and events of an isolated media property, it’s transforming the capital-c Canon, a collection of great books that have been held up for centuries as the pinnacle of literary achievement. And while I can’t speak to what the experience of transforming those great works felt like for Barbara Kingsolver or Percival Everett, I can speak to what it felt like for me.

I sat with my feelings of love and frustration for Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist for years before I did what so many fic writers do: I wrote a novel about it. I’ve had a soft spot for the character of Fagin ever since I first heard Clive Revill perform “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two” on my grandma’s cassette tape of the musical Oliver! And even though the original Fagin is far more sinister than the whimsical Broadway version, this didn’t dampen my love for him in the slightest. Ironically, Fagin does very little actual thievery in Oliver Twist—the thing we see him steal most often is the scene. He talks circles around every other character, and the passage where he outsmarts the bumbling Noah Claypole makes me laugh every time.

So that’s the part I love. It’s probably obvious what part I’m troubled by. Fagin is one of the most famous antisemitic caricatures in English literature, outdone perhaps only by Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. He’s a greedy, selfish, conniving, ugly old Jew who kidnaps children while keeping a box of jewels hidden under the floorboards. He’s a two-dimensional monster Dickens added to his novel to shock, frighten, and titillate. The point was never to imagine Fagin as a fully realized human being.

It’s the perfect entry point for a fic writer. A compelling, instantly recognizable, perversely beloved character the original author didn’t see fit to finish. It’s like Charles Dickens handed me the world’s most inviting sandbox and said “Go ahead, play around. I’m done here anyway.”

The project isn’t without risk, of course. Critics and scholars have spent two hundred years dissecting Dickens’s works to understand exactly why and how he was a genius. Transformation invites comparison, and it’s a daunting prospect to hand the world a book and say, “Tell me if you think it’s better or worse than Charles Dickens.”

At the same time, we do ourselves a disservice by deciding some authors are above critique or transformation. The Western canon favors a singular viewpoint, offering a deep but narrow and often biased perspective into human experience. Many canonized works richly deserve their place as cultural touchstones, but that doesn’t mean they’ve covered everything.

Moreover, a book can be a beloved classic and still be imperfect. It can deal in prejudices that were more widely accepted in a bygone era (though “accepted” isn’t a synonym for “acceptable”). It can introduce an interesting character but not finish the sketch. It can wander away from the plot and ideas a reader finds most interesting. For me, Oliver Twist does all of these things. Writing Fagin the Thief allowed me to make sense of these imperfections while having tremendous fun spending creative time with a character I love.

Transformative works introduce a middle path between censorship and reverence that I find especially urgent right now. A book can be brilliant and also troubling. When you ban or stop teaching a classic book, you lose access to art that has inspired people for centuries. But when you present the classics as divinely inspired texts that should not be questioned, you reinforce that some perspectives are more valuable than others. You force readers to hold themselves at a remove, their discomfort or critique irrelevant when faced with a Great Man of Genius.

So bring on more classic literature fan fiction. Enjoy the stories that make up our shared cultural fabric. But let’s keep asking these books “what if?” and “why?”—and let’s see how they answer.

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Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein is available from Doubleday, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.