We've had a lot of fun with this year's publishing phenomenon on HuffPost UK Culture - more fun than Potter or Dan Brown combined.
From parodies to literary boyfriends to the book world's worst sex scenes, we've been as guilty as anyone else of making the most of one those wonderful, rare periods when it's the name of a book that's on everyone's lips.
But when this morning brought the news that a publishing house were planning to rework classics like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice to include 'explosive sex scenes', something about the idea jarred. The first reaction, from the team and users alike, seemed to be: isn't this '50 Shades Of Too Far'?
Clandestine Classics, the adult fiction publishers sought to justify the decision to crowbar 'bondage scenes between Catherine and Heathcliff' into Wuthering Heights and sex scenes between Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson into classics by Arthur Conan Doyle by suggesting the authors themselves might have quite approved.
"I've often wondered whether the Bronte sisters, if they were alive today, would have gone down the erotic romance route," mused Claire Siemaszkiewicz, the company founder.
"There's a lot of underlying sexual tension in their stories."
Perhaps it hasn't occurred to Siemaszkiewicz that the sexual tension is 'underlying' for a reason, and that Emily Bronte decided not to have Catherine and Heathcliff ravish each other in a pile of hay for reasons of craft, rather than simply because she was living through less enlightened times than ours.
A quick poll of the office's biggest Bronte fans reveals that it is precisely the unconsummated, spiritual nature of the pair's love that makes Wuthering Heights one of the most exciting and romantic stories ever written.
But let's be honest here, any literary justification for this has to be entirely disingenuous. The eye-watering arrogance of Clandestine Classics assuming they have the 'missing scenes' from works of genius aside, the telling sentence in Siemaszkiewicz's statement was this:
"People are going to either love it or hate it. But we're 100% convinced that there's a market there."
Cashing in is the name of the game here, no different really from when the porn film industry feeds off the mainstream by making Shaving Ryan's Privates or Shindler's Fist.
But Siemaszkiewicz does make one further attempt to dress up the concept by claiming that their range of e-books will "bring the classics to a new generation of readers".
Read the full piece at HuffPost UK.
Further story on subject from HuffPost
From parodies to literary boyfriends to the book world's worst sex scenes, we've been as guilty as anyone else of making the most of one those wonderful, rare periods when it's the name of a book that's on everyone's lips.
But when this morning brought the news that a publishing house were planning to rework classics like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice to include 'explosive sex scenes', something about the idea jarred. The first reaction, from the team and users alike, seemed to be: isn't this '50 Shades Of Too Far'?
Clandestine Classics, the adult fiction publishers sought to justify the decision to crowbar 'bondage scenes between Catherine and Heathcliff' into Wuthering Heights and sex scenes between Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson into classics by Arthur Conan Doyle by suggesting the authors themselves might have quite approved.
"I've often wondered whether the Bronte sisters, if they were alive today, would have gone down the erotic romance route," mused Claire Siemaszkiewicz, the company founder.
"There's a lot of underlying sexual tension in their stories."
Perhaps it hasn't occurred to Siemaszkiewicz that the sexual tension is 'underlying' for a reason, and that Emily Bronte decided not to have Catherine and Heathcliff ravish each other in a pile of hay for reasons of craft, rather than simply because she was living through less enlightened times than ours.
A quick poll of the office's biggest Bronte fans reveals that it is precisely the unconsummated, spiritual nature of the pair's love that makes Wuthering Heights one of the most exciting and romantic stories ever written.
But let's be honest here, any literary justification for this has to be entirely disingenuous. The eye-watering arrogance of Clandestine Classics assuming they have the 'missing scenes' from works of genius aside, the telling sentence in Siemaszkiewicz's statement was this:
"People are going to either love it or hate it. But we're 100% convinced that there's a market there."
Cashing in is the name of the game here, no different really from when the porn film industry feeds off the mainstream by making Shaving Ryan's Privates or Shindler's Fist.
But Siemaszkiewicz does make one further attempt to dress up the concept by claiming that their range of e-books will "bring the classics to a new generation of readers".
Read the full piece at HuffPost UK.
Further story on subject from HuffPost
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