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# Happy Birthday to a Classic
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/happy-birthday-to-a-classic/
- Published: 2013-01-28T21:41:39.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:18:32.000Z
- Description: Today, one of my favorite books turns 200: Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's brilliant novel of wit, manners, and love. The anniversary got me thinking broadly about the — genre? category? medium? — that seems to be forever expanding these days, book art, and more specifically, about the work of Je
- Author: Jillian Steinhauer
- Tags: Opinion, book art, Books, Jane Austen, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 06:51 (2012, 2013, part 1)

![Jennie Ottinger, "Pride and Prejudice (book cover)" (2011), gouache and graphite on paper (cover), summarized and hollowed book (click to enlarge) (all images © Jennie Ottinger, via Flickr/johanssonprojects unless otherwise noted)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/01/ottinger-pandp3-320.jpg)

Jennie Ottinger, “Pride and Prejudice (book cover)” (2011), gouache and graphite on paper (cover), summarized and hollowed book (click to enlarge) (all images © Jennie Ottinger, via Flickr / johanssonprojects unless otherwise noted)

Today, one of my favorite books turns 200: *Pride and Prejudice*, Jane Austen’s brilliant novel of wit, manners, and love. The anniversary got me thinking broadly about the — genre? category? medium? — that seems to be forever expanding these days, book art, and more specifically, about the work of Jennie Ottinger. I first saw Ottinger’s book-inspired artworks at the Miami Project fair this past December, and I was totally charmed by them. For her pieces, Ottinger transforms literary classics into beautiful, funny, and seriously abridged versions of their former selves: she re-creates their covers as gouache paintings that seem to distill the plots down to their essence; she strips bare the insides of the books and inserts handwritten plot summaries; and she often creates other gouaches to represent key scenes.

Though I hadn’t seen it in Miami, this morning I wondered if Ottinger had ever done *Pride and Prejudice*; it seemed like too seminal a work to miss. And indeed, it turns out she has, with a hilarious cover that conveys the long, sometimes torturous road Austen takes to get Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy together. In all of Ottinger’s *Pride and Prejudice* works, the characters spring to life in a new way — they seem to look out at the viewer, raise their eyebrows, and ask, “Really? These are the scenes and circumstances I must live out again and again for your benefit?”

While I can’t, in good conscience, recommend Ottinger’s art as a substitute for the real thing, her loose, painterly gouaches are a wonderful kind of tribute art, encapsulations of a book that’s been adapted so many times it’s impossible to keep track and of characters that “by now \[are\] nearly mythological,” in the [words of critic William Deresiewicz](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/happy-two-hundredth-birthday-pride-and-prejudice.html?ref=hyperallergic.com). Enjoy them, and then get to reading.

![Jennie Ottinger, "No Thanks (scene from Pride and Prejudice)" (2011), gouache and graphite on paper, 11 x 14 inches](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/01/ottinger-pandp1.jpg)

Jennie Ottinger, “No Thanks (scene from Pride and Prejudice)” (2011), gouache and graphite on paper, 11 x 14 inches

![Jennie Ottinger, "Under the Weather (Scene from Pride and Prejudice)" (2011), gouache and graphite on paper, 16 x 20 inches](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/01/ottinger-pandp2.jpg)

Jennie Ottinger, “Under the Weather (Scene from Pride and Prejudice)” (2011), gouache and graphite on paper, 16 x 20 inches

![The interior of one of Ottinger's books (image via TK)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/01/ottinger-open-book.jpg)

The interior of one of Ottinger’s books (image via janitesonthejames.blogspot.com)