Jane Austen in Pakistan: Soniah Kamal’s Unmarriageable

The article reads Soniah Kamals’ novel Unmarriageable (2019) as an insightful exploration into the viability of the novel of manners in contemporary Pakistani literary scene. In a witty prose that pays tribute to Austen’s sumptuous style and sophisticated dialogues, Kamal’s version of Pride and Prejudice tackles issues of gender and class in a postcolonial patriarchal society that is undergoing processes of emancipation and modernisation, and in which cultural mimesis has shifted from passive imitation to creative appropriation.