Lovers of Jane Austen beware - Fay Weldon is rewriting her for the 1990s. Ms Weldon, you may (or may not) recall, adapted Pride and Prejudice for BBC television in 1980. It was a singularly dreary adaptation and perhaps she's still smarting from its lack of critical or popular success, because she has just written for Channel 4 what she terms "the antidote to all those costume dramas".
So what's her idea of an antidote? Quite simple, really - just take up Pride and Prejudice yet again, only this time get rid of all those silly Bennet sisters and instead concentrate your attention on their male siblings, who don't get much of a look-in in the book.
Having decided on that, you then update the story to the 1990s when all sensible young men would much rather stay at home and scrounge off their parents than find gainful employment and an independent abode. You make Mrs Bennet a health club owner in Chelsea and her husband a retired bank manager on a miserly pension, and for a plot-line you have Mrs Bennet desperately trying to find suitable marriage partners for her four layabout sons, one of whom is divorced and one of whom is gay.
You call the resulting adaptation The Bennet Boys and you explain your rationale for the whole exercise by pointing out that today's young men "find it much easier to have their socks washed by their mother. What's happened is that what was once true for men is now true for women. Women earn much more now. They're better educated, too. It's much easier for girls to leave home. The whole gender thing is reversing."
Maybe so, maybe not, but why drag poor old Jane Austen into it? Alas, Ms Weldon doesn't say.
Writers Inc, Anna Livia FM's weekly programme devoted to creative writing, is running a poetry and short story competition in conjunction with Bookstop.
Submitted poems should be no longer than forty lines, while the stories shouldn't exceed 1,600 words. Closing date for entries is January 28th and the winners in both categories will receive £100 and have their work broadcast on Anna Livia.
If you want to find out more details, contact Anna Livia FM, 3 Grafton Street (tel. 01-6778103).
Still on competitions: next year the National University of Ireland is offering a prize of £2,000 for a work of historical research published by a student or graduate of the NUI in the three years up to next April.
The successful work must be "substantial" and of "an original character" indicating "direct research in historical records", and if you feel that in the past three years you've published something meeting those requirements, apply to the Registrar, National University of Ireland, 49 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, before April 1st.
At Christmas, Berowne declares in Love's Labour's Lost, "I no more desire a rose/Than wish a snow in May's newfangled mirth."
Quite so, though in our own century the New Yorker's E.B. White didn't mention either snow or roses when he drily observed that "to perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year". That was written almost fifty years ago, so I wonder what he would think of today's Christmasses, which start their commercial assault in November and reach a frenzied climax on the eve of the day itself.
But let's try to think of Christmas in romantic terms, and nowhere is the season more lovingly described than in the great lyrical passage F. Scott Fitzgerald places towards the end of The Great Gatsby. Narrator Nick Carraway is recalling the train journeys he made back west from school and college at Christmas time:
"When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again.
"That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow."
May you have such a Christmas this year.