Mrs. Ben­net has always remind­ed me of a Jew­ish moth­er. A har­ried matri­arch, des­per­ate to see her five daugh­ters wed? My own moth­er isn’t far off from that, though she only has three daugh­ters, and her def­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess is broad­er than sim­ply mat­ri­mo­ny, the main aspi­ra­tion for most Regency women.

As a Jew­ish woman and a life­long fan of Jane Austen’s books, I thought it just made sense to write a Jew­ish adap­ta­tion of Pride and Prej­u­dice. I knew from the start that I want­ed Rachel Weiss, the hero­ine of my debut nov­el, Rachel Weiss’s Group Chat, to be a mod­ern-day ver­sion of Brid­get Jones — the star of the most famous Pride and Prej­u­dice adap­ta­tion. Brid­get is zany, sar­cas­tic, and per­pet­u­al­ly Too Much in a world (Lon­don of the 1990s) where women are sup­posed to be small, qui­et, and polite.

This felt relat­able to me, as I’m sure it does to many oth­er Jew­ish read­ers and movie­go­ers. Were the book set in a present-day Seat­tle, Brid­get Jones would be Jew­ish, for sure.

I have always been con­flict­ed about the stereo­typ­i­cal brash Jew­ish woman car­i­ca­ture. On the one hand, the Fran Fines of the world are famil­iar to me: I saw my mom, aunts, and grand­moth­er in them. On the oth­er hand, as a painful­ly shy child, I didn’t see myself in them at all, and it was anoth­er data point in the run­ning list of things (includ­ing being Jew­ish only on my mother’s side, and a gen­er­al lack of Yid­dish vocab­u­lary) that made me Not Jew­ish Enough. (Enough for what? We may nev­er know.)

But as an adult, I fell in love with the Jew­ish char­ac­ters I was see­ing on screen, like Midge Maisel, Ilana Glaz­er, and Alex­is and David Rose. They were sharp, fun­ny, beau­ti­ful, and irrev­er­ent. Know­ing at my advanced age that I would nev­er become a char­ac­ter like that, I decid­ed to write one.

Enter Rachel Weiss, the Jew­ish, Seat­tle-dwelling answer to Brid­get Jones and her pre­de­ces­sor, Eliz­a­beth Bennet.

Eliz­a­beth Ben­net is beloved for her wit, her intel­li­gence, and her abil­i­ty to be a lit­tle removed from the gen­er­al hub­bub. The reserved book­worm in me always relat­ed more to her than to any of the Jew­ish char­ac­ters I read about. (Not that I had many of those to choose from. The only Jew­ish books I remem­ber read­ing in my child­hood took place dur­ing the Holo­caust.) Eliz­a­beth Ben­net is, in a word, aspi­ra­tional. Mr. Dar­cy falls in love with her because she is, as we might say today, ​“not like oth­er girls.” I took that idea and ran with it. Rachel Weiss, a bold, con­fi­dent, loud-mouthed Jew­ish woman in but­toned-up Seat­tle, is def­i­nite­ly not like the oth­er women our hero, Christo­pher Butkus, meets in his sphere. But when he hints as much, she calls him out on it. Because while Rachel does love to read as much as Eliz­a­beth Ben­net, she also loves to shop and drink rosé as much as the next girl, and she knows there’s noth­ing wrong with that.

Anoth­er cen­tral ele­ment of both Rachel’s and Elizabeth’s sto­ry is friend­ship. Eliz­a­beth is aghast when her friend Char­lotte announces her inten­tion to mar­ry Mr. Collins. Once she recov­ers from the ini­tial shock that her friend could make such a big deci­sion with­out con­sult­ing her — and from the fact that Char­lotte made a deci­sion Eliz­a­beth would nev­er have made for her­self — Eliz­a­beth under­stands that Char­lotte was doing what she felt she had to do. I wove sim­i­lar themes into the sto­ry­lines of Rachel’s three best friends. They strug­gle with their love lives in dif­fer­ent ways, and Rachel grap­ples with how she feels about their choic­es, and how their love lives grad­u­al­ly take prece­dence over their friend­ship. Whether Rachel is aware of it or not, her sense of cer­tain­ty that she knows what’s best for her friends mir­rors the way her moth­er treats her and her sisters.

There’s a ker­nel of truth in every stereo­type, and there are some Jew­ish moth­ers who feel that they know what’s best for their chil­dren and are not afraid to say it. While Mrs. Ben­net and Rachel’s moth­er, Beth Weiss, are both shrill and embar­rass­ing, I gave Beth Weiss a slight­ly redeem­ing moment in which Rachel sees the fear, love, and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty behind her mother’s scheming.

Because this is my debut nov­el, and because it is a Jew­ish retelling of Pride and Prej­u­dice, I’ve felt impos­tor syn­drome in more ways than I can count. The Ben­nets, while not out­casts, are some­what on the fringe of soci­ety. Rachel Weiss’s fam­i­ly, while not dis­crim­i­nat­ed against, doesn’t ful­ly fit in as a Jew­ish fam­i­ly in a cul­tur­al­ly Nordic Seat­tle. At the same time, Rachel’s Jew­ish­ness is not cen­tral to the plot, and her love inter­est isn’t Jew­ish. Will Jew­ish read­ers be dis­ap­point­ed at the lack of Jew­ish­ness in the sto­ry? I asked myself. Will they feel misled?

In the end, I’ve had to remind myself that Rachel’s sto­ry is reflec­tive of a cer­tain type of Jew­ish life that’s famil­iar to many of us: one where the most potent reminder of our Jew­ish­ness is going back to our par­ents’ house for Shab­bat din­ner now and then. It is a Jew­ish sto­ry, because it’s Rachel’s. And mine.

Jane Austen may nev­er have writ­ten a Jew­ish char­ac­ter, but her sto­ries have inspired gen­er­a­tions of read­ers and writ­ers, and retelling her beloved Pride and Prej­u­dice through a Jew­ish lens turned this shy, Jew­ish book­worm into a pub­lished author.