Trouble in Paradise: Pride and Prejudice as Vampire Romance

Abstract

After Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005), Austen fanfic authors have turned their hand to reimagining the greatest love story of all, Pride and Prejudice, as vampire romance. The merging of Austen’s greatest romantic hero, Mr. Darcy, with the romantic vampire promises to produce a new ideal of the romantic lover: handsome, virile, protective, noble, affluent, forever young yet wise with experience, and, most notably, immortal. It also promises an eternal love of a different sort, not one that endures death and persists into an incorporeal afterlife, but one that can be enjoyed physically forever. This, however, is arguably an impossible ideal. Beginning with Meyer’s Twilight as a foundational text, this chapter examines how successfully the hypermasculine and fiendish vampire of old is reconciled with Austenian romantic values in Amanda Grange’s Mr. Darcy, Vampyre (2009), Colette L. Saucier’s Pulse and Prejudice (2012) and Dearest Bloodiest Elizabeth (2015), and Regina Jeffers’ Vampire Darcy’s Desire (2009). Where Grange and Jeffers look to restore Mr. Darcy’s humanity as a way to restore the magic of human love, Saucier’s erotically charged novels allow Austen’s beloved heroine to explore the heady delights of vampire love, but ultimately, at a considerable cost.