IT is a truth commercially acknowledged that Jane Austen’s high-spirited heroines can be recast as Hollywood brats or Bollywood sirens, wittily navigating the eternal perils of class, romance and unworthy men.

Few challenges, however, are as unusual as the latest foe facing Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice – a plague of the undead sent to reduce the picturesque villages of Longbourn and Meryton to smouldering ruins.

Hollywood studios are bidding to turn a radical reworking of Austen’s most popular book, now called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a parody to be published in April, into a blockbuster movie.

Desperate for new ideas, studio chiefs hope “P&P&Z” will mark the bloody birth of a feral offspring of classic British literature: “monster-lit”.

The idea of mixing different genres has spread from pop music, where old tunes are merged to make fresh hits, to the internet with fan homages such as Lizzie the Vampire Slayer, where Bennet is transported into the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The forthcoming novel is the first mainstream “mash-up” of Austen and horror, two of the most popular film genres of the past decade. It has been made possible only because Austen is out of copyright.

This weekend Seth Grahame-Smith, the author of P&P&Z who is based in Los Angeles, revealed how he and an editor at Quirk Books, an independent publisher, developed a diagram tracing connections between seminal period novels to cult movie genres, including robots, vampires and aliens.

“It quickly became obvious that Jane [Austen] had laid down the blueprint for a zombie novel,” said Grahame-Smith, a television comedy writer. “Why else in the original should a regiment arrive on Lizzie Bennet’s doorstep when they should have been off fighting Napoleon? It was to protect the family from an invasion of brain-eaters, obviously.”

From then on it was easy to imagine Bennet and her four sisters as zombie slayers, trained since childhood in the deadly arts of Chinese kung fu, and Fitzwilliam Darcy as a promoter of the socially superior ninja skills of Japan. Together they stand bonnet to epaulette against a plague of cannibalis-tic interlopers from the accursed city of London.

Grahame-Smith hopes that his talent agency, William Morris, will sign a film deal with a studio in the next few weeks.

“About 85% is the original Jane Austen text,” he said. “I hated her when I was forced to read Austen in school, but when I started rereading I realised she was a brutal, but very funny, satirist. I can only aspire to be as mean-spirited as she could be.”

Other talent agencies are pitching their own slate of monster-lit titles. They include a version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, where Catherine, the deceased heroine, returns as a Japanese-style ghost not only to haunt but also to terrorise Heathcliff.

In a reworking of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre , M r Rochester has something more terrible than an insane spouse in his attic, and a version of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss is powered by human sacrifice.

Claire Tomalin, author of Jane Austen: A Life, her bestselling biography, suspects the novelist would have appreciated the latest zombie twist.

“Many of her early stories written for her brothers were very violent,” said Tomalin.

“She did have a strong sense of humour and also knew what publishers liked. As with Shakespeare or Mozart, you can mishmash what you like but the original remains. I am looking forward to reading this one.”

Jane’s suitor

THE identity of a mystery suitor who wooed Jane Austen during a holiday romance is to be revealed in a new book.

The suitor's existence is known from family letters but neither his name nor the town where he met her has ever been established.

The name of the Rev Samuel Blackall, a Cambridge academic, appears in Austen’s letters. Now biographer Andrew Norman, a former GP, claims to have traced Blackall to a tryst with Austen in Totnes, Devon, in 1802.

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