Reimagining the Classics from a New Perspective

Reimagining the Classics from a New Perspective

This article relates to James

Percival Everett's James is a reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved companion Jim. This kind of reconfiguration is a common source of inspiration for authors, as one can see in the following list of books that similarly provide new points of view on classic works of literature.

Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor (2022)

This novel is a retelling of The Great Gatsby that focuses primarily on the women from the original story: Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby's former flame; Jordan Baker, Daisy's best friend; and Catherine McCoy, a suffragette who appears only briefly in the original text. In an interview with The Avid Pen, Cantor explains that she was inspired to write the novel by the relative little space given to these characters by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "I've always wanted to know more about the women in The Great Gatsby. They're such a huge part of the plot, and yet they barely speak."

The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud (2015)

In The Meursault Investigation, Algerian author Kamel Daoud reimagines Albert Camus' The Stranger (1942) from the perspective of a character who does not appear in the source material: the brother of the (nameless) Arab man shot by main character Meursault on a beach at the end of Part I. The brother, Harun, reflects over the course of the novel on God, Algeria, and alienation, among other subjects. Calling the book an "instant classic," The Guardian explains the significance of the book as an indictment of French colonialism: "Harun is an ur-Algerian reflecting on colonialism, the legacy of thousands of Meursaults and their callous indifference to Arab life."

The Women of Troy trilogy by Pat Barker (2018-2024)

Like Beautiful Little Fools, Pat Barker's Women of Troy trilogy reimagines a classic work from the perspectives of its women. In this case, Barker tells the story of Homer's Iliad with a focus on Briseis, former queen turned unwilling concubine of first Achilles and then Agamemnon. Briseis meets other female characters from the original text along her journey, including soothsayer Cassandra and Helen of Troy; but Barker also introduces characters of her own invention, such as an enslaved girl named Amina, who appears in the second volume and is loosely based on Antigone. (Though not retold from a different perspective, Marcial Gala's 2022 novel Call Me Cassandra is another excellent story inspired by the myth of Cassandra.)

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

In "The Husband Stitch," one of the short stories in Machado's collection Her Body and Other Parties, the author draws from a French folktale of unknown origin commonly referred to as "The Girl with the Green Ribbon." In the original story, a man falls in love with and marries a mysterious woman who never, over the course of their entire lives, removes the green ribbon she wears around her neck. When she finally allows her husband to do so on her deathbed, her head falls off. Alexander Dumas and Washington Irving both wrote versions of this story; Machado's version tells it from the woman's point of view, with a haunting feminist twist.

There are many, many more examples of authors exploring famous works from a new perspective. Readers who enjoy James might also want to check out Finn (2007) by Jon Clinch, which imagines a potential story for Huck Finn's father (more recently, in 2019, Clinch published Marley, a new take on A Christmas Carol). March (2005) by Geraldine Brooks tells the story of the patriarch of the March family from Little Women. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys is one of the most celebrated examples, as it gives agency to the famously imprisoned and unfairly maligned character of Rochester's wife from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the "madwoman in the attic."

Filed under Reading Lists

This "beyond the book article" relates to James. It originally ran in April 2024 and has been updated for the March 2024 edition. Go to magazine.