Pride, Prejudice, Sex, and Drugs: How Jane Austen Helped Me Write a Profane Novel

In an early scene of my novel The Singer Sisters, rock singer Emma Cantor stands with her guitar in a sea of marijuana smoke, cursing at an audience of college kids—using fuck as an adjective before almost every noun. Her profanity is so earnest and frequent that I sometimes laugh when I read the scene out loud. I laugh because, as I launch into a novel whose plot involves casual sex, shady pill-dispensing doctors, extramarital affairs, lines of coke and many a sparked doobie, I have to ask myself: “What would Jane think?”

Jane, of course, being Jane Austen, whom I join millions of readers in worshiping as a literary goddess, Jane Austen whose six full-length novels I refer to as “The Six” and whose plastic figurine sits above my writing desk.

I would die for Jane. A large section of my bookshelves has become overrun by different special editions of her work. I have dressed up in Regency clothing for Jane, live-blogged Austen adaptations on Masterpiece Classic and yelled at the TV when they were unfaithful to her vision, read reams of literary criticism and “para-literature” related to her work. In short, I consider “Janeite” one of the core pieces of my identity.

And although Jane Austen, who occasionally exhibited a prim morality along with her wicked sense of humor, might be taken aback by my central references to sex, drugs, and other bad behaviors, and although the biggest love story in The Singer Sisters ends in a split while all her books end in marriage, I still claim her as a major influence. After all, Jane Austen wasn’t as stuffy as people make her out to be: offstage seductions, unplanned pregnancies, and even duels take place in several of her novels.

But more crucially, on a craft and theme level, she wrote the book(s) on complicated female characters moving through a world that looks tempting, but is perilous. The more I think about my own writing and the shape of my novel, the more I see her literary footprint splashed across its pages.

For instance, the opening of The Singer Sisters involves a family sitting around their kitchen table discussing the economic prospects of their only daughter. They’re not stating it that way, of course—they’re just berating Emma for choosing to go on tour instead of going to an Ivy League school.

Emma thinks her parents, middle-aged folk singers Judie Zingerman and Dave Cantor, are cramping her style. But her mother, Judie, is so rigid and passionate about Emma’s choice it precipitates a family crisis. When I wrote this scene, I didn’t consciously intend to echo Austen, but there are obvious parallels that seeped in anyway; Austen’s novels often open with anxiety about the daughters of the family in the form of their marriage prospects.

Austen’s matchmaking mothers, especially Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, are seen by many as meddlesome and even absurd when they try to snag well-off husbands for their daughters, against those daughters’ romantic inclinations. Certainly that’s how I saw those fictional characters when I first read the six novels as a teenager.

But as time has gone on and I’ve grown older and returned to Austen’s work again and again, I have come to understand that they…kind of had a point. Mrs. Bennet was the only person in the entire family who saw clearly, without any cloud of ego or desire, how impoverished her daughters’ lives would be if they didn’t marry someone with at least a little bit of money. Her endless yammering about husbands meant survival, as well as about her own insatiable need to interfere. \

(And in the opposite vein, Mr. Bennet is terrified that his daughters will end up in a loveless, unequal match like his. The failures of Austen’s parents weigh heavily on their children.)

As The Singer Sisters makes its way out into the world, I hope readers will see that both mother and daughter are right: although Judie does pressure Emma to be a vehicle for her own unrealized hopes, she also deeply wants her child to be safe, to have a life that is not solely reliant on a man, or on the fickle music industry which can be so cruel to so many female artists. Judie, who has sought freedom and independence her whole life and never really found it, wants Emma to attain a type of freedom that comes from security, from having a fallback plan.

Emma doesn’t understand this at all—and yes, her name happens to be the same as Austen’s most notoriously wrong-headed, myopically adolescent heroine in the novel. As with Emma Woodhouse, who is blinkered by being “handsome, clever and rich,” my Emma’s existence as a talented but under-appreciated “nepo baby” makes it hard for her to have perspective.

The Singer Sisters is the story of how Emma Cantor gains perspective, especially about her mother’s life—starting from that moment of pot smoke and cursing, to a glamorous and then ugly interlude in LA, and finally back home again, older and wiser. While there’s not necessarily a great love match waiting for her at the end as there might be in an Austen novel, Emma does begin to listen to the people around her whose advice she has been ignoring for years, and to grow into her own potential.

Meanwhile, the other through-line in the book is Judie’s second chance: like Anne Elliot in Persuasion, she made a choice she regrets in her youth and has been diminished by it. Her journey towards redemption criss-crosses her daughter’s coming-of-age.

Jane Austen achieves her genius characterization by offering us competing narratives embedded in one narrative. My favorite example is the way she simultaneously makes us see that Emma Woodhouse is messing up all over the place with her matchmaking attempts—while also showing us the appeal of Emma’s view of the world: one that she can manipulate, and render interesting and meaningful instead of tedious and constrained.

As readers, we both adore and are frustrated with Emma Woodhouse on every single page. Ultimately, that double feeling comes from Austen’s ability to lightly criticize her characters while hewing close to their perspective and making us care about them, through her use of free indirect discourse, where the narrator floats in and out of her protagonists’ subjectivity. This is Austen’s gift to two centuries of readers, and to every writer who tries to achieve that perfect balance with our own characters.

E.M. Forster famously said about Austen’s “round” characters, they are real because like us, they are both knowable and just a tiny bit unruly. We leave our fifth or sixth reading of Persuasion or Pride and Prejudice not quite sure what motivates our heroines at their core—did Anne Elliot turn down her youthful love, Captain Wentworth, because her family interfered, or because she was scared to leave her aristocratic world and defy them?

Does Emma try to set up her friend Harriet because she wants to help make the world better, or just to amuse herself? Does Elizabeth Bennet resent Darcy at first because she is salt-of-the-earth and he’s stuck-up,  or because he said she wasn’t “handsome enough” to dance with and offended her vanity? Does she later fall in love with him because of his kindness to her family, or because of his “beautiful grounds” at Pemberley, of which she could be mistress? And is Darcy himself a vicious snob or deeply socially awkward?

We think we know, but aren’t sure. Most likely it’s both. Because the extent to which our egos intrude into our morality, our decisions, is a mystery even to us.

In The Singer Sisters, most of my characters are performers, which makes them more than a little self-obsessed. But they also have deep love for each other and for art and music; the interplay between those feelings provides the tension that moves the story forward.

Does Judie want to curtail Emma’s career because she’s envious of her daughter’s potential, or because she’s protective and loving? Does Emma strike back against her mother because she’s genuinely wounded by her, or spoiled and vindictive? Or is it both?

As the best rock stars know, and as Jane Austen also knew, it’s good to have a sliver of enigma in your personality. As people start to get to know my own character creations, I hope they feel intimate with them, that they love them, and are frustrated by them. But I also hope they close the book musing, just a little bit, about who was really right in their arguments and fights, and what really motivated their choices.

In that way, my characters will walk with their readers off the page and into the world. And if they manage to achieve that, even with a few readers, I’ll have Jane to thank.

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The Singer Sisters by Sarah Seltzer is available via Flatiron.