It’s hard to imagine Pride and Prejudice set in 21st-century Cincinnati, but with a few forays to California and New York, the action in Curtis Sittenfeld's ELIGIBLE unfolds there. The novel is the result of a match made by The Austen Project, which pairs popular authors with Austen's books, and one could argue that Sittenfeld is the perfect writer for this endeavor. The successful author of four previous books, including PREP and AMERICAN WIFE, she shows an impressive ability to get to the heart of relationships, even as she transposes 18th-century English society and manners to another continent, 200 or so years later. She also has mastered the pacing of today’s fast-paced fiction: a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter, most of which can be read while standing in a checkout line.

ELIGIBLE tells the story of the Bennet family, which is comprised of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their five unmarried daughters. All but one (Mary) are beautiful, and one --- our protagonist, Elizabeth (now Liz) --- is also impetuous, smart and feisty. She lives in New York but returns home when her father has a heart attack, leaving her relationship with her longtime lover, Jasper.

"[Sittenfeld] shows an impressive ability to get to the heart of relationships, even as she transposes 18th-century English society and manners to another continent, 200 or so years later. She also has mastered the pacing of today’s fast-paced fiction..."

In this version, Elizabeth and Darcy are still at the core of the novel, though Liz is now a magazine writer, and Darcy is a doctor at a local Cinci hospital. They meet at a dinner, and depending on how the reader interprets their sparring, it’s love or hate at first sight. The rest of Liz’s family is as silly and shallow as they were in the original, with the exception of Jane, who is as beatific --- and beautiful --- as ever. Her relationship with Dr. Chip Bingley begins with an immediate attraction between the two, as in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, where he was the equally eligible Mr. Charles Bingley.

Mrs. Bennet is particularly difficult to take here, with her catalog shopping habit and unwillingness to consider the financial vagaries that have befallen her family. The other sisters --- Lydia, Mary and Kitty --- have their idiosyncrasies, which result in their remaining childlike and homebound despite their relatively advanced ages. This is a particularly difficult area for the author to navigate, as 18th-century women of a certain social strata were not expected to work outside the home. But what to make of three healthy, young, contemporary women who are perfectly content to eschew joining the work force? 

One of the other difficulties that Sittenfeld has navigated to an impressive extent is making the misunderstandings between Liz and Darcy, and Jane and Chip --- which are the core of the novel --- seem realistic. In 18th-century society, and given the relative disparity in social status between the men and these women, such miscommunication was understandable, as were the women’s inability to make their own needs and wants clear. It’s a little more of a stretch in present-day America, especially among relatively sophisticated --- and promiscuous --- people.

Sittenfeld takes some license with her characters, who end up on a reality show called, not coincidentally, “Eligible.” But she manages to bring them back from this potentially tawdry precipice (and there are others that may shock the modern-day Austen fan) to give us an ending that, dear reader, is everything we might have wished for.