I like to have something on in the background while I work on a sewing project, whether it's a movie or the Doctor Who episodes I'm woefully behind on. Last weekend I decided to try out
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which I've meant to look into for months. I wish I'd done it earlier, because it took a few hours to watch all of these. Thankfully I had quite a bit of sewing to do. The only problem is, I sometimes found myself stopping to watch Lizzie instead of sewing.
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries are a modern take on
Pride and Prejudice. Lizzie and her friend Charlotte are college students producing Lizzie's video diary as a way to put their studies in film production and mass communication to use. Most of the book's characters find their way into Lizzie's videos, especially her sisters Jane and Lydia (I think this is my favorite portrayal of Lydia I've ever seen). Sadly, Kitty is an actual cat and Mary is now a cousin, but the story doesn't suffer for their relative absence. (For some time with Mary, check out
Lydia's short series of videos.) Mr. Bingley is now Bing Lee, and he only has one sister, Caroline (Is it just me, or does Louisa, and therefore also her husband, get dropped out of 90% of the adaptations?). We haven't seen much of Mr. Darcy yet, and nothing of Wickham (though there has been texting!). The idea of Lady Catherine as a venture capitalist is a hoot.
I'll stop going on and on and let you watch.
In preparing this post, I discovered so much more to this story: Lizzie's site has
a listing of all the videos with Twitter conversations inserted into their appropriate spots in the timeline. Tumblr is also listed at the top, but none of the random links I clicked showed me Tumblr posts. Sadly, I haven't had time to work my way through all the links, but that will be a weekend spent in bliss when I do.
This is a really interesting way to tell a story. I'm certainly going to keep following (I think they're only about half way through the events of the book at the moment.)
