There have been many attempts to alter Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE to suit modern tastes. PD James’s DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY sought to shake up the Bennet sisters with a grisly murder plot. Seth Grahame-Smith memorably produced an augmented edition of the text entitled PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES. Most grotesquely of all, the BBC decided that a new audience for Austen’s classic love story could be reached by showing candid images of Colin Firth’s sagging nipples, freshly soaked in pond water, on national television. However, no update could be quite as depressing as THE SECRET DIARY OF LIZZIE BENNET.

The general idea of authors Bernie Su and Kate Rorick is to transport Lizzie and her friends from 1814 to 2014 and, less palatably, from England to America. In this version, Pemberley is no longer a country estate, but the headquarters of “hipster” Darcy’s Internet company. Mr. Bingley, in a case of fictional affirmative action, becomes Bing Lee, not an English gentleman of leisure, but an Asian American student in Medical School. Not that there is anything wrong with these alterations in principle. It is, as they say, the way they do it. 

"THE SECRET LIFE OF LIZZIE BENNET left me feeling a little sadder to be living in this century than I was before I started it."

The trouble is what constitutes modernity for Su and Rorick. Essentially it comes down to the ubiquity of social media. This is not so much a novel as a fictional character’s Facebook page; it is stuffed with Buzzfeed-style piecharts, references to (actually existing) YouTube videos, and reproductions of text messages that are supposed to be particularly amusing. It feels as though you have spent the last week or so Facebook stalking a friend you don’t even like that much. One comes to the same conclusion always reached having spent too long clicking through someone else’s pictures and scrolling through their amassed statuses while resolutely not “liking” a single post; your life is not nearly so interesting to me as it evidently is to you.

Presumably much fun was had by the writers in replacing Austen’s impeccable wit with modern slang. Lizzie proclaims “this George Wickham had game.” “OMG”s abound. Is the idea that kids today really are incapable of reading a book that was written by someone who doesn’t speak exactly like they do? The word patronizing springs to mind. Meanwhile, what is lost in all this is the Regency-era grandeur and eloquence of the original.

The other major change that occurs in this modernization is all real darkness being removed from the novel. Whereas Austen has Charlotte all but throwing away her life by marrying Mr. Collins, in this version she merely takes a job from him that initially is presented as selling out, but in the end turns out to be completely fine. Nor does Lydia have to marry the ghastly Wickham; she just has an unhappy fling with him, which is distressing for a while before all harmony is restored. In Austen’s novel, there exists on the periphery of the plot real pain; the comedy is set against a background life that is always complex and often unhappy. Not so here. Buzzfeed, YouTube and Facebook have conspired to reduce all lived to an infinitely boring and infinitely upbeat stream of pointless communications.

In all, THE SECRET LIFE OF LIZZIE BENNET left me feeling a little sadder to be living in this century than I was before I started it.