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PHILADELPHIA - At Drexel University, Paula Marantz Cohen holds the title of distinguished professor of English, and is considered an expert in 18th-century literature. But, her fiction is firmly rooted in popular culture.
Her first, best-selling novel, "Jane Austen in Boca,'' transplanted "Pride and Prejudice'' to a Jewish retirement community in Florida, and her second book, "Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan,'' set Shakespeare in the heart of the Philadelphia suburbs. With her third, "Jane Austen in Scarsdale: Or Love, Death, and the SATs,'' Cohen sticks with her formula for success, setting her version of ``Persuasion'' at a New York public high school.
Question: You did not write fiction until your mid-40s. How come?
Answer: In my youth I wanted to be a writer, but I could never seem to do it. I would start novels and not be able to get beyond 15 or 20 pages. I think I was too inhibited. You have to achieve a point of not caring that what you do may not be great fiction, or that it's not what people think you should write. I think I couldn't get to that point until I reached my mid-40s.
I worked at a small newspaper in North Jersey summers during college, thinking I might be a journalist. But I had this fear of driving and every time I was sent somewhere, I'd get lost. So I couldn't be a journalist because I couldn't find my way to the story. I'd be lost, God knows where.
Q: So you, essentially, put that dream away and became a college professor?
A: Right. And then one day I was in Barnes & Noble and picked up that Judith Krantz book "Sex and Shopping,'' and in it she said she started writing novels at 47, and that's how old I was at the time. I had an epiphany, I really did. I drove home thinking, I'm going to write a novel.
Q: Where did you get the idea to adapt Jane Austen plots?
A: Years before, I'd said to my husband that my in-laws' life in Boca Raton reminded me of a Jane Austen novel. And when I decided to write a novel, I knew I could use a Jane Austen plot, because plotting is my weakness. I wrote it really quickly - something like three months.
Q: Your new book is set in a high school during the stressful college-admission season. How did you come up with the idea to write about the SAT-test world?
A: It's just so ripe for satire, I knew if I was going to write a satirical novel, that's what I would write about. The question was how I was going to do it. I didn't initially want to do another Jane Austen adaptation, but it somehow fell into place.
Q: You teach at the college level. How well do you know the high school world?
A: My mother was a high school teacher. My sister was a high school teacher, and my brother-in-law teaches. And, of course, I've gone through this college admissions thing with my own family.
Q: In addition to teaching and writing, you also host a cable television show, "The Drexel InterView,'' don't you?
A: Yes, it highlights the range of people that reflect Drexel's disciplines. ... We've had Robert Venturi and his wife, Denise Scott Brown, and Ellen Goodman and Molly Ivins, and some entrepreneurs and physicians and engineers doing interesting work. I enjoy it. It's like being a journalist, and I don't have to drive.
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(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
