Spectator competition winners: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ meets Pride and Prejudice (literary mash-ups)

The germ for the latest challenge —to provide an extract that is a mash-up of two well-known works of literature — was the discovery that Middlemarch was originally two separate works: a novel about the townspeople (the Vincys, Bulstrode, etc) and a short story called ‘Miss Brooke’, which focused on the country folk. Neither worked on its own, so Eliot stitched them together and, hey presto!

I realised, reading your entries, that the brief had been ambiguous: while some of you lifted the exact text, others went for a looser approach. Both were permissible and both produced some terrific entries. Honourable mentions to Lauren Peon and Adrian Fry. The winners take £30 each.

D.A. Prince (‘Howl’ meets Pride and Prejudice)
I saw the best daughters of my generation
      destroyed by lack of fortune, maternal
            hysteria, running naked,
                  being dragged through the balls of Netherfield
      mother-fixed on future matrimony,
who bared their shoulders to flaming candles with
      radiant cool eyes hallucinating Mr Bingley,
who was universally acknowledged as singular
      and mile-high with money to burn in waste
            paper baskets and in want of a wife,
angel-headed Bennets levered up for the ancient
      heavenly connection to property,
who hollow-eyed with passion sat up talking in the
      supernatural darkness of Longbourn
            contemplating uniforms and wild
                  regiments of lust,
who contrived the fabulations of Darcy, secret
      hero of this poem, who sweetened the
            snatches of girls trembling in the
                  sunset,
who fantasised Pemberley while the sirens of
      Lady Catherine de Bourgh wailed them
            down piano-playing in despair
who overturned the entailment of fathers to the
      end of patience.