Speculatively, Seven Classics Get the Fifty Shades of Grey Treatment
We’re not saying that you have to be of below-average intelligence to like Fifty Shades of Grey, but we ARE saying that you need to be pretty stupid to only read classics like Pride and Prejudice because they’ve been rewritten to appeal to the Fifty Shades demographic.
A demographic which, apparently, is millions of people.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the company Total E-Bound is releasing their own, sexed-up versions of classic books like Jane Eyre, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Pride and Prejudice as part of a new series labeled “Clandestine Classics.”
According to the WSJ, the head of Total E-Bound, Claire Siemaszkiewicz, says that “the new series was planned before the ‘Shades of Grey’ franchise exploded. But she’s not denying it’s likely to help.” The classic books that they are re-releasing now all fall under public domain rights and have no copyright issues, so liberties can and totally, TOTALLY are taken in what the characters do—with each other and with, I suppose, anal plugs. That said, the company’s website promises that “the essential prose remains mostly unchanged, supplemented by 10,000 words or more which promise to take readers ‘behind the closed bedroom doors of our favourite, most-beloved British characters.'”
All of which got us thinking.
We’re ALWAYS thinking it seems like, lately.
What other authors were “stifled by the conventions of the time” as Siemaszkiewicz feels the Brontë sisters were?
