Best novels retold from a different character's point of view

(Image credit: Granta / Pan MacMillan / Bonnier Books)

published 20 March 2024

The newly published "James" by Percival Everett reimagines the narrative of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain, 140 years after its first publication, from the perspective of Huck's enslaved sidekick, Jim. But this isn't the only book to tell a familiar story through the eyes of another character. Here's our pick of the best retold novels.

'James', by Percival Everett

Taking the voice of Jim, the "enslaved runaway" in "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", Percival Everett gives us a "coolly electric first-person narrative" in this "majestic" novel, said The New York Times. Generally, Everett keeps "the broad outlines" of Mark Twain's work: "riding the same currents; the book flows inexorably, like a river, yet its short chapters keep the movement swift". The result is a "rambunctious, perspective-altering book", said The Guardian, which has the "adventurous spirit of the original" but also "contemporary resonances".

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Sandra Newman "courageously takes on" this "mirroring" of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" through the eyes of Winston Smith's lover, Julia, said The Telegraph. "Spoiler alert: she succeeds, brilliantly." Reviewer Erica Wagner advised re-reading Orwell's book after you've read "Julia", so that you can "feel how powerfully Newman inhabits and remakes Orwell's text, in her careful use of language, the images she chooses to echo or change, the way she remoulds Orwell's characters into something truly original". The "undertaking of 'Julia' as a novel", said The New York Times, is partly to "climb into" the "misogyny of Orwell's writing, and flesh out a woman's perspective". Julia and the other female characters are "thin in comparison with Winston's complex interiority and with the wider world of Big Brother". Julia works in the Ministry of Truth, fixing the fiction machines, and the novel would "appear to 'fix' Orwell's novel for a contemporary feminist readership".

"Feminist retellings" of Greek myths are a genre that's "in vogue", said The Telegraph. In Bea Fitzgerald's debut novel on Persephone we meet her as a young child, who is asked what she wants and replies: "The world." However, her father Zeus decides that she should be "Goddess of the flowers" and "she senses 'all my hopes, all my lofty ambitions crumbling away… This felt like a punishment'." The book "retells the myth of Persephone and Hades", where "Hades ensnares Persephone in the Underworld" by splitting the ground open beneath her feet. In this retelling "our heroine is less easily fooled" and chooses to go to the Underworld, "seeing it as the only place to escape from marriage". Once there, she must convince the "slightly startled" Hades "to support her plan to wreak havoc with the chauvinist gods". This "fantasy rom-com retelling", as Culturefly dubbed it, interweaves the "classic story with snarky banter, slow burn romance and a feminist slant".

In Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice", middle daughter Mary Bennet is "bookish and gauche" and "doesn't have a story of her own" but is simply there "to serve as a foil to her sisters' charm, and a temporary obstacle to their happiness", said The Guardian. In "The Other Bennet Sister" she is still "plain, awkward, overlooked – but she is now our protagonist". And "with this shift of focus, our sympathies shift". Hadlow takes "a handful of textual clues" in "Pride and Prejudice" and "teases out Mary's story, through childhood and early adolescence" and eventually to her "straitened circumstances as a spinster sister, dependent on the uncertain hospitality of family and friends". The novel's great achievement is to "shift our sympathies so completely that when happiness becomes a possibility for Mary, it's difficult not to race through those final pages".

In Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", Rosaline is only spoken of as the older cousin of Juliet and a former lover of Romeo. This "subversive counter-narrative" spans "a time both before and after the star-crossed lovers' final descent in the crypt", said The Independent, and reimagines Romeo and Juliet's "characters, their motivations, and their destinies" to create a "vivid, turbulent, and compelling" new story. We learn that Romeo "isn't actually the boy we've always believed him to be", said Culturefly. And after seeing him "disarm and discard" Rosaline and then turn his attention to Juliet, the story is "rendered less of a passionate romance with a tragic end and more a horrifyingly inevitable tragedy in the making".

Stretching the premise slightly is this prequel to "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë, although it does, of course, give "a voice and an identity to Mr Rochester's first wife, Antoinette – aka Bertha, the madwoman in the attic" and it has become a "gateway text to post-colonial and feminist theory", said the BBC. Antoinette is a "potent heroine, plucked half-formed from the shadowy margins of one of literature's best-loved romances". From "Jane Eyre" we "learn little about Bertha", only that she's "a monster who must be bound with rope, a white woman from the Caribbean whom Rochester was long ago pressured into marrying for her money", said Time. But Rhys, who grew up in the Caribbean, "presses on the silences in Brontë to give Bertha her own story" and "turns a menacing cipher into a grieving, plausible young woman".

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Adrienne Wyper has been a freelance sub-editor and writer for The Week's website and magazine since 2015. As a travel and lifestyle journalist, she has also written and edited for other titles including BBC Countryfile, British Travel Journal, Coast, Country Living, Country Walking, Good Housekeeping, The Independent, The Lady and Woman’s Own.