Open thread: Who should re-write Jane Austen?

Mansfield Park and Persuasion remain up for grabs in a project to rework Austen for contemporary audiences

The Austen Project, with bestselling contemporary authors reworking "the divine Jane" for a modern audience, kicks off later this month with the publication of Joanna Trollope's new Sense & Sensibility, in which Elinor is a sensible architecture student and impulsive Marianne dreams of art school.

Also promised are versions from Val McDermid (Northanger Abbey), Curtis Sittenfeld (Pride & Prejudice) and – gadzooks – the prolific Alexander McCall Smith, most famous for his Botswanan private eye novels, who has been let loose on Emma (an experience he describes as "like being asked to eat a box of delicious chocolates").

Yet to be announced, however, are the lucky authors who'll be reinterpreting Austen's two remaining novels. Here on the books desk we fancy Kate Atkinson, – so good at evoking global undercurrents in spiky family sagas – for Mansfield Park, a novel about life as a poor relation, with the issue of slavery lurking in the background.

And for Persuasion, a brilliant study of missed opportunities and second chances, about the way being made for someone changes as time goes by, how about David Nicholls, whose One Day chronicles the will-they-won't-they relationship of mismatched couple Dexter and Emma from youth to middle age?

Who would be your choices to rewrite Austen?

Jane Austen
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