Thomas Hardy and Gustave Flaubert don’t usually spring to mind when graphic novels are mentioned. But British cartoonist and illustrator Posy Simmonds is changing all that. A longtime contributor to the British newspaper, The Guardian, Simmonds’ first foray into reinventing classic literature as graphic novels came in 1999 when Gemma Bovery, an updated version of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, ran in the daily paper.
Now, Simmonds returns to this side of Atlantic with a new book, Tamara Drewe, this time updating Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel, Far From the Madding Crowd, a new interpretation of the story of a spirited woman who moves to the country to farm and attracts a variety of suitors. Once again Simmonds skewers middle class English life and sets her updated story among the inhabitants of an idyllic writer’s retreat, whose worlds are turned upside down by the arrival of beautiful newspaper columnist Tamara Drewe. The strip originally ran in The Guardian in late 2005 through early 2006. In October, Houghton Mifflin will publish Tamara Drewe in book form.
Gemma Bovary, Simmonds’ version of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, was published in the U.S. in 2005 by Pantheon. It tells the story of modern-day Gemma Bovery, an unsatisfied young woman who convinces her new husband, Charlie, to move from London to rural Normandy, where she embarks on a tragic affair. “When Gemma Bovery was published in book form [in 2005], it was a surprise to hear it described as a ‘graphic novel,’” Simmonds told PWCW in an email interview. “I hadn’t set out to write a graphic novel, but it became one,” she said. Three years earlier, Simmonds had proposed the idea of a serial to The Guardian, a change from her usual work of strips and single cartoons. “The inspiration of drawing a modern Madame Bovary came during a trip to Italy,” Simmonds explained. “I saw a beautiful young woman surrounded by Prada and Armani shopping. She was clearly bored to death with her husband/life/everything and she reminded me of Flaubert’s heroine.”
For Simmonds, basing her stories on classic literature has its advantages. “The characters and plot are already there, to be paralleled or deviated from,” she said. But Simmonds said that even though “a large percentage of Guardian readers would have been familiar with Madame Bovary, I thought it important in my rendering that it shouldn’t matter whether they knew the original or not.”
This philosophy certainly applied to Tamara Drewe, where the borrowing from Hardy is much less obvious. “My first rough draft was about a literary retreat but after fiddling with the main character--a temptress with several lovers--I saw similarities to Far From the Madding Crowd.” Since Drewe appeared in the literary section of The Guardian, “a story about writers or one based on a classic seemed appropriate,” Simmonds said.
And while Gemma Bovery made a quick transition from newspaper strip to book--with corrections to spelling and punctuation--TamaraDrewe required a bit more work. “Gemma Bovery [ran] daily, so the episodes linked together quite smoothly [but] Tamara Drewe ran weekly--a much bigger gap between episodes, which meant a lot of repetitions to remind readers what had happened and who people were,” Simmonds continued. “There was just enough time before the book deadline,” she said, “to rewrite narrative, re-draw frames or sometimes whole pages, to draw chapter opening pages and to expand some of the characters’ roles.”
On the publishing side, Simmonds’ latest endeavor is in the capable hands of Houghton Mifflin senior editor Anjali Singh, who has an impressive track record with graphic novels. During her previous tenure at Pantheon, Singh edited some of the most critically acclaimed graphic novels published in the U.S., among them Marjane Satrapi’s international bestseller, Persepolis (2003).
“What appeals to me about Posy’s work,” Singh said, “is both how human her characters are and how good she is at conveying our various human weaknesses, but always with this incredibly light touch.” Singh continued: “There’s something so immediate and visceral about seeing a picture and certainly in the case of [Satrapi’s] Persepolis, the format helped make a story that could potentially seem so foreign feel that much more familiar, and like a story any reader could relate to.”
The same goes for Simmonds’ work: there’s something about seeing these doomed heroines of classic literature drawn so clearly on the page. It makes the story an accessible experience rather than a tedious school reading assignment. For Singh, the works of Flaubert and Hardy convey “something so fundamentally true and transcendent about the human experience, which is what makes them perfect for any kind of adaptation or modern retelling.”
Singh said that she is drawn to graphic novels with a more literary bent, books whose audience “is pretty similar to the audience for the literary fiction that I like to publish.” There is also a decidedly satirical streak in Simmonds work that also appeals to Singh. “Her drawings are so lovely and innocent-seeming, yet there’s this wicked wit that runs throughout.” If you take a careful look at the cover of Tamara Drewe, which is dominated by the portrait of a lovely young woman in the foreground, you’ll just notice two sheep in the background having sex.
