FICTION THAT REIMAGINES CLASSICS from a different point of view—fan fiction, essentially, albeit somewhat more respectable than what that term usually denotes—has a long pedigree. You could make the case for Paradise Lost being the great-great-granddaddy of the genre. Notable modern examples include Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which focuses on Hamlet’s hapless school chums; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which rehabilitates the attic-dwelling mad wife from Jane Eyre; and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, in which the witch from The Wizard of Oz gets a name and a story. Now, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, that greatest of twentieth-century political dystopias, joins the ranks of classics retold with Julia by Sandra Newman, published late last year. It’s an imaginative and well-written, if not always satisfying, complement to its source.
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