‘Ballet Shoes’ was far ahead of its time, so why the ‘modern’ rewrite?
Updating the classics is all the rage in publishing, but will it really attract new readers, asks Emily Bearn
Noel Streatfeild would be on one heck of a publicity tour if she were alive today. In the last seven months alone, she has had three new children’s books published, including a collection of short stories found buried among her papers more than 30 years after her death. One rediscovered title, The Theatre Cat, is described by its publisher as “a charming time capsule of a story” – which is surely the key to much of Streatfeild’s appeal. So why, oh why is her estate allowing Ballet Shoes, her 1936 masterpiece about three orphaned sisters preparing for a life on the stage, to be rewritten “for the modern era”?
This delicate task has been entrusted to Carrie Hope Fletcher, an actress and Youtube star who has written several novels, though never one for children. According to her editor, Fletcher’s version of the novel will remain very “Ballet Shoes-y”, but in a contemporary and “slightly alternative” London setting. Like the original, it will feature three adopted children called the Fossils, but the ballet dancer will now be a boy, and the palaeontologist Great Uncle Matthew, who adopts the children, has been replaced by a pebble collector called Great Aunt Maude.
This drive to update the classics for young readers is the new rage in publishing. Earlier this month, we had Tanya Landman’s “truly accessible” version of Jane Eyre; which follows recent rewrites of everything from Kipling’s Jungle Book to Enid Blyton’s
Malory Towers, in which we see the arrival of a girl from India. (“India!” a third former gasps.)
It is easy to dismiss such projects as mere marketing ploys. But Landman’s Jane Eyre, which is printed in a dyslexic-friendly font, is part of a commendable campaign to introduce reluctant readers to the classics. Now it is Streatfeild’s turn for a makeover. As Fletcher, 27, puts it, the “fun” of the project has been about “keeping the magic of the original while giving it a modern, updated feel”.
If Fletcher can retain the magic, it will be a feat. Streatfeild was one of the most cherished novelists of the last century, whose every story was meticulously thought out. “I find that it takes me nearly a year of thinking about my people before I know them well enough to write about them,” she said, and it was that sense of intimacy that distinguished her work. So do we have any right to tamper with her most famous novel of all? In short, yes, because Ballet Shoes is not just a novel, but, as Streatfeild put it, “a fairy story” – and it is the fate of all fairy stories to be retold. And if Fletcher can make this enchanting tale accessible to less confident readers, then hats off to her.
In fact, her mission to give it a “modern feel” might be easier than she thinks. For the book was always ahead of its time. When children’s fiction was full of boarding school high jinks and pony-riding heroines, Streatfeild wrote about moneyconscious children with an admirable feminist outlook.
“We three Fossils vow to try and put our names in history books because it’s our very own and nobody can say it’s because of our grandfathers,” the children famously pledged. It is a line that even a 27-year-old author might struggle to update.