Hi readers! Happy Friday! I am very thrilled to welcome Jennifer Adams to Austenesque Reviews today!

Jennifer is the best-selling author of the much-beloved BabyLit series. Which, if you remember, began with BabyLit Pride and Prejudice in 2011. Now, Jennifer has 30+ titles in BabyLit series – and one of the newest of those is Persuasion!

Jennifer, it is such a pleasure to have this opportunity to talk with you and get know you! I’d love to learn about you as a reader – what types of books do you love to read? Have you always been a fan of the classics?

I have always been a fan of the classics—I remember discovering Pride and Prejudice and Gone with the Wind when I was a teenager and becoming lost in them. One of the joys of working on BabyLit has been rereading (or reading for the first time) all this wonderful classic lit.

I also really love reading middle grade novels. I have an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. I think some of the best writing being done right now is in the category. Jonathan Stroud, Lauren Wolf, Daniel Nayeri, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, Jason Reynolds, and so many others are all brilliant writers.

And how about we talk about Jane Austen in particular now. When and where did you first encounter Jane Austen? And what were your first impressions?

My aunt and my dad were both huge Austen fans, so I grew up knowing about all the books and characters. My first encounter was with the 1940 film with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. My dad and I used to watch it together all the time on weekends.

Ah, I know I’m in the minority, but that is the adaptation I’ve seen the most – I rewatched it a tone after I discovered it. Can you talk to us a little about the BabyLit series? What made you decide to write for babies versus beginning readers? And what prompted the idea of featuring primer concepts?

I had written some adult literary nonfiction—Remarkably Jane, Notable Quotations on Jane Austen and Y Is for Yorick, a Slightly Irreverent Shakespearean ABC Book for Grownups. I was talking with the then creative director (now publisher) at Gibbs Smith, Suzanne Taylor, and we were trying to figure out what was next for Shakespeare and Austen, since books about them and their work are so perennially loved. She said, “Let’s do Shakespeare for babies!”

It was important to me that the books not be “retellings.” A retelling of Dracula or Anna Karenina or any of these classics for babies is just ridiculous! So I figured out a way to make the books work for actual 0-3 year olds, while still being clever and appealing for the parents.

Did you originally expect for the series to include this many books? How much more will it grow? Do you have specific books that you are definitely wanting to still do?

It’s definitely an amazing surprise for the series to be this successful. It has sold more than two million copies and been translated into ten different languages. When I started, I thought there would be four titles, maybe six if we were lucky, and would have been happy if they had sold 10,000 copies each.

I think we will keep doing the books as long as they sell and as long as we’re having fun. Sometimes I wonder if we will eventually run out of classics, but so far that hasn’t been a problem! I’d like to do more Shakespeare and of course Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey. It’s also fun when titles come into the public domain that weren’t available when we started the series in 2011. For example, BabyLit The Great Gatsby is coming out next spring. We are very excited.

Oooh! I can’t wait to see that one! I’m so delighted that there are four Jane Austen books in the BabyLit series – maybe the one classics author you feature the most… 😏 – What do you think Jane Austen would have thought about the BabyLit series?

I often think about that question of what would Jane Austen think. What would she think if she knew how beloved her books had become? That people travel from all over the world to her house in Chawton? That her writing desk and shawl are objects in a museum? That there is such a thing as movies and so many movies have been made out of her stories? I think she would think it was all quite a lot of nonsense.

Hahaha, that sounds about right. How do you go about choosing the primer theme for each story? And was it any challenge to diversify them or avoid repetition?

That’s a great question, because the more books we add to the series, the more challenging it is to make the new book fit into the series and add something to the whole. The questions I think about are what is a primer that actually makes sense for babies—counting, colors, emotions, opposites—and what theme in the board book represents the original novel well. I also think about what will be a nice addition to the series that we haven’t done (or overdone) yet.

I bet it is fun to think of relating these classic works to primer themes. But I can imagine it is sometimes a challenge. I always like to end with some QuickFire Questions. Here are some tailor-designed for you!

• Which Jane Austen novel is your favorite? Pride and Prejudice

• Which classics novel is your favorite?  To Kill a Mockingbird

• Which Jane Austen character do you identify the best with? Anne Elliot

• If you were to host a dinner party with four characters from classic novels, who would you invite?  Pierre and Natasha from War and Peace and Anne and Gilbert from Anne of Green Gables

• Which Jane Austen characters would you want to be in a book club with? Anne Elliot and Elinor Dashwood would be good to be in a book club with, as they are serious readers and deep thinkers.

• If you could live in one classics novel, which would you choose? I’d probably chose Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Late 1800s in London, and out into the countryside, sounds really appealing if you were in Holmes and Watson’s social class.

• What is your universal truth? To each his own.

Thank you so much, Jennifer, for answering my questions! A book club with Anne and Elinor sounds delightful! And I too adore To Kill A Mocking Bird.

Congratulations on BabyLit Persuasion!

~~~

GIVEAWAY TIME!!!

Today, Jennifer brings with her a 4-book set of Jane Austen BabyLit board books for me to give away to 1️⃣ lucky winner!  Woot woot!!! 😃

To enter this giveaway leave a question, comment, or some love for Jennifer below!

• This giveaway is open North American residents.  Thank you, Jennifer!
• This giveaway ends September 20th.