"Went for me and not her
'Cuz girls your age know better."
—Olivia Rodrigo, "vampire"
Anyone who’s ever been a sophomore in high school knows it isn’t the easiest time to be a person. Crushing expectations press in on every side. School expects good grades; parents expect good behavior (or is it the other way around?). Friends expect attention; society expects conformity (or is it the other way around?). And all the while, a lethal alchemy of self-awareness and hormones makes it difficult to walk in a straight line, let alone think in one.
I remember being fifteen years old. I remember the pimples and the mortification and the geometry problems and the hair problems and feeling like I was simultaneously the cleverest woman who had ever deigned to walk the halls of my high school and also like a little girl who’d wandered into a Women’s Size 7 shoe by mistake. I remember zigzagging from irrational fear to unearned confidence to petulant vanity in a moment. Sometimes every moment. And I was fighting the battle of teenagerhood with just about every conceivable privilege on my side. It’s only now, as a grown woman twice the age of her sophomore self, that I realize just how easy I had it back then. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard.
So about a year and a half ago, when I sat down to reread Jane Austen’s sophomore novel, Pride and Prejudice, for the millionth time, I found myself dwelling on a subplot in which the story’s youngest character—a fifteen-year-old girl named Lydia Bennet—is “seduced” by a narcissistic predator and winds up stuck in an abusive marriage that practically every scholar and P&P adaptor since has framed as “her own fault.” And I started asking myself some questions:
What if my 15-year-old self hadn’t gone to St. Mary’s Academy?
What if I wasn’t allowed to get an education at all?
What if my family wasn’t financially comfortable?
What if we were, in fact, one bad illness away from homelessness and destitution?
What if I wasn’t supposed to spend my time learning because I was supposed to be looking a husband?
And what if a 27-year-old man with a violent temper and no scruples set his sights on me for no other reason than I was an easy target?
Pride and Prejudice is a brilliant and beloved book for so many reasons. The iconic “enemies-to-lovers” storyline shared by its equally iconic heroine—the free-thinking, wit-spitting, decorum-defying, precedent-setting Elizabeth Bennet—and her dashingly broody counterpart Mr. Darcy more than merits its place of honor in the history of romantic literature. Indeed, their love story is so universally adored that I thought it would’ve been a waste of my Director’s Note to wax poetic about what most of us already know is literary and cinematic gold.Elizabeth is prejudiced; Darcy is proud (or is it the other way around?). Elizabeth speaks her mind; Darcy speaks his. It’s a battle of the sexes made all the sexier by Darcy’s subsequent determination to change himself for the better, and for no other reason than respect for Elizabeth’s opinion and his own intrinsic sense of accountability.
But I didn’t write this play because of them.
I wrote this play—like most of my plays—because of the bossy, girly teenager trapped in its source material. The girl who is judged so harshly by Elizabeth, disdained so quickly by Darcy, overlooked so continually by her family, and hated so unjustly by so many of us who claim Pride and Prejudice as one of our favorite books. I wrote this play because the truth is, if I’d lived in Regency England I wouldn’t have been Elizabeth Bennet. I would have been Lydia.
And in a world full of George Wickhams—one might even say, in a world run by them—it strikes me as more important than ever to uplift stories about the happy endings that become possible when women who couldn’t be more different choose love and solidarity over their own pride and prejudice. There’s nothing the patriarchy hates more than an “enemies-to-sisters” storyline. I hope you enjoy this one.
With love and gratitude,
—Claire F. Martin
I remember being fifteen years old. I remember the pimples and the mortification and the geometry problems and the hair problems and feeling like I was simultaneously the cleverest woman who had ever deigned to walk the halls of my high school and also like a little girl who’d wandered into a Women’s Size 7 shoe by mistake. I remember zigzagging from irrational fear to unearned confidence to petulant vanity in a moment. Sometimes every moment. And I was fighting the battle of teenagerhood with just about every conceivable privilege on my side. It’s only now, as a grown woman twice the age of her sophomore self, that I realize just how easy I had it back then. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard.
So about a year and a half ago, when I sat down to reread Jane Austen’s sophomore novel, Pride and Prejudice, for the millionth time, I found myself dwelling on a subplot in which the story’s youngest character—a fifteen-year-old girl named Lydia Bennet—is “seduced” by a narcissistic predator and winds up stuck in an abusive marriage that practically every scholar and P&P adaptor since has framed as “her own fault.” And I started asking myself some questions:
What if my 15-year-old self hadn’t gone to St. Mary’s Academy?
What if I wasn’t allowed to get an education at all?
What if my family wasn’t financially comfortable?
What if we were, in fact, one bad illness away from homelessness and destitution?
What if I wasn’t supposed to spend my time learning because I was supposed to be looking a husband?
And what if a 27-year-old man with a violent temper and no scruples set his sights on me for no other reason than I was an easy target?
Pride and Prejudice is a brilliant and beloved book for so many reasons. The iconic “enemies-to-lovers” storyline shared by its equally iconic heroine—the free-thinking, wit-spitting, decorum-defying, precedent-setting Elizabeth Bennet—and her dashingly broody counterpart Mr. Darcy more than merits its place of honor in the history of romantic literature. Indeed, their love story is so universally adored that I thought it would’ve been a waste of my Director’s Note to wax poetic about what most of us already know is literary and cinematic gold.Elizabeth is prejudiced; Darcy is proud (or is it the other way around?). Elizabeth speaks her mind; Darcy speaks his. It’s a battle of the sexes made all the sexier by Darcy’s subsequent determination to change himself for the better, and for no other reason than respect for Elizabeth’s opinion and his own intrinsic sense of accountability.
But I didn’t write this play because of them.
I wrote this play—like most of my plays—because of the bossy, girly teenager trapped in its source material. The girl who is judged so harshly by Elizabeth, disdained so quickly by Darcy, overlooked so continually by her family, and hated so unjustly by so many of us who claim Pride and Prejudice as one of our favorite books. I wrote this play because the truth is, if I’d lived in Regency England I wouldn’t have been Elizabeth Bennet. I would have been Lydia.
And in a world full of George Wickhams—one might even say, in a world run by them—it strikes me as more important than ever to uplift stories about the happy endings that become possible when women who couldn’t be more different choose love and solidarity over their own pride and prejudice. There’s nothing the patriarchy hates more than an “enemies-to-sisters” storyline. I hope you enjoy this one.
With love and gratitude,
—Claire F. Martin
