How Did I Miss This?

In last week's non-YA book recommendation post I mentioned my love of Jane Austen novels and briefly noted that Pride and Prejudice is my favorite. That being said, I am horrified that I only discovered the Lizzie Bennet Diaries last week, especially because the series was created by Hank Green, brother of my new favorite YA author, John Green.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, as I just implied, is a Web series and an updated re-telling of Pride and Prejudice. Lizzie Bennet in the series is a grad student studying mass communications who started a video blog as part of her thesis project. She has two sisters, Jane and Lydia, an overbearing (and apparently Southern) mother, and a father who is pretty hands-off. Her video blog is in the confessional, girl-sitting-in-front-of-her-computer-in-her-bedroom style even though her best friend Charlotte Lu, a wannabe filmmaker, films and edits them.

Lizzie's video blog might have been pretty boring if a rich med student named Bing Lee hadn't bought a house in the neighborhood just before she started it.

Lizzie isn't the only character we've seen, though. There's been quite a lot of her sisters, Jane and Lydia (in the series Mary Bennet is their cousin and Kitty Bennet is Lydia's pet cat - how cute is that?), and Charlotte Lu (Charlotte Lucas in the book). We've also seen Bing Lee (Charles Bingley in the book), Caroline Lee (Caroline Bingley in the book), George Wickham, Ricky Collins (William Collins in the book), Fitz Williams (Colonel Fitzwilliam in the book), Gigi Darcy (Georgiana Darcy in the book), and, of course, William Darcy (Fitzwilliam Darcy in the book). Other characters mentioned but not seen are Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and (Lady) Catherine de Bourgh.

As someone who has read Pride and Prejudice at least six times and watched the Keira Knightley movie more times than I can count, I really love seeing how the writers update the story. For instance, Mr. Collins is no longer a clergyman, but is now a guy with a start-up Web video company. And Catherine de Bourgh is the venture capitalist who is the primary backer of his venture. Furthermore, the major characters all have online lives complete with Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. (In fact, I discovered the Lizzie Bennet Diaries through Tumblr.) I haven't become immersed enough in the story to follow any of the characters on Twitter (yet), but I have seen a few tweets and it's enough to tell me that Twitter is used to expand the story rather than just promote the series.

I watched every episode of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries in the last week and now I am all caught up. The downside of that, though, is that I have to wait for the next episode. The episodes are no more than six minutes long, which allowed me to watch a lot of them in one sitting, but I won't be able to do that with new episodes any more. All things considered, though, I'm glad I'm caught up. And even more glad that I discovered this gem of a Web series.