FICTION

The Private Diary of Mr Darcy, by Maya Slater. W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London, 2009
2009. ISBN 978-0-393-33636-8
 
Mr Darcy’s Diary by Maya Slater, Phoenix, Orion Books Ltd, London, 2007. ISBN 978 0 7538 226 1

Mr Darcy’s Diary, large print edition, Bath: Windsor 2007. ISBN 978-1-405-68600-6 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-405-68601-3 (paperback) 
On CD
Mr Darcy’s Diary, read by David Rintoul, BBC Audiobooks, 2008.

Jane Austen’s enigmatic hero is tantalisingly absent for most of Pride and Prejudice, but I had never thought of filling the gap myself till someone asked me ‘What book would you most love to read, if only it had been written?’ I found myself answering, without hesitation, ‘Oh, Mr Darcy’s diary.’ I had idly toyed with the idea before, and now it bothered me for months, till finally I had to give in to it. I thought I would be sticking closely to Jane Austen’s novel, so I started straight in describing Mr Darcy’s first meeting with Elizabeth, Austen’s heroine.

But then the book’s direction was taken out of my hands by my hero. Mr Darcy was going to lead me where he wanted to go – and I soon found that he was taking me to places where Jane Austen could never have followed. Although the book works through to Austen’s lovely happy ending, on the way it tells the hero’s own separate, surprising and sometimes shocking story. So you don’t have to know Pride and Prejudice to read it.
Some opinions on the UK edition of this book
(See also the full-length reviews.)

"Seamlessly weaving in bits of the original, this entertaining novel gets the curmudgeonly hero spot on" (Katy Guest The Independent )

"Mr Darcy's Diary boldly goes where Jane Austen never does" (John Sutherland The Financial Times)

"As moving and enjoyable as could be wished... Mr Darcy fans everywhere will welcome his Diary to the canon" (Wendy Holden Daily Mail )

"A thoroughly absorbing read" (Yours Magazine )

"Maya Slater creates a convincing world for Fitzwilliam Darcy... a real cappuccino of a book -- deliciously frothy, but with a definite kick" (Jocelyn Bury, Jane Austen's Regency World )

"A witty and entertaining exploration of Darcy's side of the Pride and Prejudice story, with some surprising revelations about his private life" (Andrew Davies, scriptwriter of 1995 BBC TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice)

Mr. Darcy's Diary - paperback

Mr. Darcy's Diary - audiobook

The Private Diary of Mr. Darcy

Letters to Lydia - Jane Austen Made Me Do It

‘Letters to Lydia’ in Jane Austen Made me Do It, ed. Laurel Ann Nattress, Random House, 2011. ISBN 978-0-345-5246-6
 
 This short story in an anthology of Austen-inspired fiction retells the story of Elizabeth and Darcy’s romance as witnessed by the naïve Maria Lucas, who misinterprets everything that happens.

TRANSLATIONS

Moliere - The Misanthrope, Tartuffe

​ Molière: The Misanthrope, Tartuffe and Other Plays, Oxford World’s Classics, 2001. ISBN 978-0-19-954018-1

I was commissioned to do a new translation of Molière by Oxford World’s Classics - and as Molière is one of my favourites, I was eager to take it on. I decided to do a rhyming translation, using Molière’s own verse form, the alexandrine or twelve-syllable line. I spent two years translating the six plays - some of the rhyming couplets took me hours. It’s a bit like doing a difficult crossword puzzle - you know there is a ‘right’ solution, it’s just a matter of finding it. Hard work, but I loved doing it.

Three Pre-Surrealist Plays

​Three Pre-Surrealist Plays, Oxford World’s Classics, 1997. ISBN 0-19-283217-4 

When my students planned a production of Alfred Jarry’s rude, rumbustious play, Ubu the King, they showed me the translation they planned to use. It was awful. After tinkering with it, I decided that it would be simpler to translate the whole play myself. So I did, they performed it, and it got lots of laughs. It was not till much later that I thought of publishing it, together with two other favourite plays of mine, Apollinaire’s The Mammaries of Tiresias, a wittily surrealist fantasy with a hidden message about birth control, and Maeterlinck’s The Blind, a magical and disturbing vision of a sightless world. 

La Fontaine: Selected Fables

​La Fontaine: Selected Fables, translated by Christopher Wood, edited by Maya Slater, Oxford University Press, World’s Classics, 1995. ISBN 0-19-282440-6 (Editor). 

 I loved La Fontaine, loved teaching him, and was delighted to be asked to edit and write the introduction to a new translation. The translator and I worked for hours to bring these animal Fables across as closely as possible to the original, while preserving their ironic, often biting wit.

Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence

​Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence 1921–1960, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater, edited by Maya Slater, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-8179-1024-2 (Editor) 

This selection reflects the events of Pasternak's life during forty turbulent years through his correspondence with his parents and sisters, and sheds new and revealing light on the great writer's life and work. The letters are especially poignant in that after 1923 Pasternak never saw his family again. I was asked by the Hoover Press to edit this translation by my husband Nicolas.

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Doctor Zhivago (Limited Edition), published by The Folio Society

Doctor Zhivago, Standard Edition, published by The Folio Society

​Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater, Edited by Maya Slater, with illustrations by Leonid Pasternak, The Folio Society, November 2019.  (Editor, Picture Editor).

 This has been an absorbing and all-consuming task that has taken us both a year of solid work, arguing over every sentence. The pictures are taken from paintings by the Russian Impressionist painter Leonid Pasternak, who was Nicolas's grandfather, and Boris Pasternak's father. Boris wrote:  ‘Papa… is a great, great artist, far greater than I am.’ He would undoubtedly have chosen Leonid Pasternak to illustrate his novel – but of course it was not to be, as Leonid died in 1945, before any of Dr Zhivago had been written down. Instead, I have assembled 68 of Leonid’s pictures  chosen for their echoes of the novel. Inevitably they won’t match the text as closely as a commissioned illustration, but nevertheless the pictures and the text are often uncannily close.  I was helped by a lucky coincidence: almost the whole novel is set in exactly the period when Leonid was working in Russia, and at his most prolific. In 1921, Leonid left Russia, never to return, and saw his son only once after that. So the pictures chosen here are mostly taken from that early period, when Leonid was painting Russia.
Some of the pictures are genuine historical documents, like an eyewitness record of a violent street protest in 1905, drawn by Leonid, looking out of his Moscow window. Others, though they seem appropriate, are actually depicting something quite unrelated – for example, a sketch illustrating a family meal actually shows Leonid’s own family decorating Easter Eggs. Yuri Zhivago and Boris Pasternak himself were more or less the same age, so it made sense to use Boris as a model for Zhivago. Other members of the family are also used – Leonid drew them constantly. Even Leonid himself appears  - and I have managed to include a portrait of  the translator, my husband Nicolas, who was painted by Leonid in what was probably his last ever watercolour.

Ivan Turgenev, Love and Youth

Ivan Turgenev,  Love and Youth, Essential Stories, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater. Pushkin Press, London, 2020. ISBN 13: 978-1-78227-601-2.
 
This was our first collaboration as co-translators, and we found we worked well together, with numerous robust arguments. The novella ‘First Love’ is an enchanting portrait of an irresistible minx. The other stories reveal Turgenev’s  deep love of Russian country life and country people. I had known about him from the French angle (he was a close friend of Flaubert, and had a lengthy, passionate affair with a Parisian actress). But these stories show him on his home ground, Russian to the core. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Bad Business, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater, Pushkin Press, 2021. ISBN 13: 978-1-78227-673-9
 
We chose these stories to illustrate the breadth of Dostoevsky’s writing. He excels at wildly extravagant black humour, the conversations of rotting corpses in their graves, or of a pompous civil servant swallowed by a crocodile, but then paints  a compassionate portrait of a destitute orphan girl forced to marry a paranoid pawnbroker. 

Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater. New York Review Books, New York, 2022.  ISBN 978-1-68137-635-6

Turgenev’s most famous novel, and a gripping read, with seething emotions  and a sombre, rebellious anti-hero, Bazarov, a self-declared nihilist, to whom nothing matters save rebellion and revolution.  Published in 1862, the portrait of this angry, sulky, sexy young rebel, who sneers at his elders, influenced  generations of writers from Dostoevsky to Sartre and even inspired the thinking behind the Russian revolution.
 
“an excellent and highly readable translation” Adam Kirsch, New York Times.
 
“…highly readable, and can occasion another look at the book, for those who’ve read it before, or a first look for those who haven’t.” Keith Gessen, New Yorker.

TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater, in preparation for publication in 2026 by The Folio Society.

ACADEMIC BOOKS

The Craft of La Fontaine, Athlone Press

The Craft of La Fontaine, Athlone Press, London, 2000 and Associated University Presses, Cranbury, NJ, USA, 2001.

This study of La Fontaine’s style represents about ten years' work. I started teaching La Fontaine, and quickly became fascinated by the subtle brilliance of his poetry. Many people dismiss him as an amusing children’s poet, dashing off witty moral tales in verse. But these lively fables are in fact small masterpieces.

Humour in the Works of Proust

Humour in the Works of Proust, Oxford University Press 1979.
 
This book started off as my doctorate thesis, on an aspect of Proust’s writing that gets far too little attention. Of course his masterpiece is serious, philosophical, even searing, and always vividly descriptive, but these strengths tend to obscure the fact that it is also a great comic novel. Dozens of ridiculous characters people the book, and their ideas, their language, even their punctuation can raise a smile, and at the most tragic moments.

Women Voice Men: Gender in European Culture

​Women Voice Men: Gender in European Culture, ed. by Maya Slater, Intellect Books, Exeter, 1997. ISBN 1-8711516-93-5 

For this collection I got together a group of dynamic women from different walks of academic life - specialists in literature, sociology, law, history and psychology - and asked them to write about men, any aspect that really got them fired up. Their contributions are all excellent, and very different.