I’m hardly what you’d call one of those stuffy literature people, but this sounds kinda horrifying.
Thanks to all this Fifty Shades of Grey junk, a company called Total-E-Bound Publishing has enlisted some of its romance writers to add sex scenes to the classics.
Some original fans of Jane Eyre might be unhappy to discover that the female protagonist has “explosive sex with Mr Rochester” in the publisher’s erotic edition.
In Wuthering Heights, heroine Catherine Earnshaw “enjoys bondage sessions” with Heathcliff while sleuth Sherlock Holmes has a sexual relationship with his sidekick Dr Watson in the new e-book.
Claire Siemaszkiewicz, founder of Total-E-Bound Publishing, which is releasing the titles from July 30 in digital format, said: “We’re not rewriting the classics. We’re keeping the original prose and the author’s voice. We’re not changing any of that.
“But we want to enhance the novels by adding the ‘missing’ scenes for readers to enjoy.
“People are going to either love it or hate it. But we’re 100% convinced that there’s a market there.
“We’ll be bringing the classics to a new generation of readers as well as to people who love the classics but would like to see what we have done with them.”
I’m sure that curiosity market will exist for a while, I just hope they don’t mistake it for actual success.
And allow me to point out the obvious. Missing scenes? If they were missing, why are you hiring people to create them rather than having historians discover them in archives as they were written hundreds of years ago?
I’m sure this sounds a bit hypocritical coming from a guy who enjoys cover songs that play with genres, but this seems much different somehow. It doesn’t feel like it’s being done for the sake of art. It’s designed simply to cash in on something, and I can’t stand that.
