Get the ebook for free on Gumroad until May 13th (too controversial for Amazon)

What if every gendered word in Pride and Prejudice were inverted—while every other word remained the same?

Welcome to matriarchal Regency England, where inheritance flows through daughters, mothers rule the household, and a frantic Mr. Bennet is determined to secure advantageous marriages for his sons. Theodore Bennet finds himself instantly at odds with the proud, aloof Ms. Daphne—and thus begins a reading experience that is at once recognizable and deeply disorienting, revealing the hidden assumptions embedded in one of the most beloved novels in English literature.

Using a painstaking, word-by-word transformation, this edition preserves Jane Austen’s original text while inverting its gendered language. The first in the Matriarchy Classics series, Gender-Swapped Pride & Prejudice is a striking literary experiment that invites you to experience a familiar world through an unsettling new lens.

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More about Matriarchy Classics

I began my gender-swapped classics project years ago during my PhD in computer science. Eighty percent of computer science graduate students were men, and ninety percent of electrical engineering graduate students were men, which meant that in my research group, in my classes, and at department socials, I was the odd woman out. This was not back in the 1950s. This was in 2020.

I began to fantasize about what an inverted world would look like. In my imaginary matriarchal society, the other students and professors would mostly be women. When I walked through the walnut-paneled halls of the Dean’s Office, all the portraits of past deans would be of women. When I flipped through a history book, the portraits of past presidents would all depict women. I imagined the women of classic literature strolling around with all the power and all the money, going on grand adventures and making world-changing decisions.

I thought creating a software program for gender-swapping classic literature would be easy, no more than a simple find-replace. I was wrong. I soon ran into complicated issues with certain pronouns and punctuation marks that required a fair amount of thought to resolve. I ended up manually creating gender-swap mappings for over 900 gendered English words and their plural forms. Every time I decided I was done, I’d come across yet another term that needed to be swapped. “Horsewoman” for example was one of the later terms I caught in Pride and Prejudice. (You cannot simply replace all instances of “man” with “woman” because you’ll end up with nonsense transformations like “manor” to “womanor.”) Over time, the project evolved into a kind of specialized algorithmic translation.

In the Matriarchy Classics, every word remains the same, except for gendered words which are all inverted. A gender-swapped book is not intended as a criticism of its original author. It is not a parody or a retelling. It is a mirror. I invite you to read one and decide what you see.

Gender-Swapped Pride and Prejudice is free on Gumroad until May 13th!