I've been rererereading Pride & Prejudice; it's a funny thing, but every time I do, Mr. Darcy begins falling in love with Elizabeth Bennet earlier in the book. I was sparked into reading P&P by the recent acquisition of one of the crop of new sequels, Mrs Darcy's Dilemma, by Diana Birchall.
Disclaimer: I've known Diana online for several years, and have met her in person a couple of times now, even staying with her once to enjoy a weekend with a mutual friend.
It feels odd and a little dangerous to review a book by someone I know; I don't doubt she'll see this - at least, if I were an author, I would certainly be periodically Googling my books. To shorten the suspense and preserve my own safety, I will therefore state up front that I liked it. It's a lightweight story, as I think it's meant to be, but it's amusing and pleasant and, most important of all for a sequel by another author, not annoying. By that I mean I didn't get hit across the eyes with anachronistic phrases or ideas that screamed "NOT BY JANE!!"
However, truly, it's not Jane Austen. On the other hand, it's very good Diana Birchall. The characters have a recognizable provenance in Austen's, and are very likely thirty-year-later outgrowths of the originals. I don't think this book has the rapier point or the delicate irony to its observations that P&P has; on the other hand, sheltered Jane would not have been capable of creating Lydia's wild daughter Bettina, or at least not of making her sympathetic in the end, as the considerably less sheltered Diana has done.
Diana has written a few Austen sequels; Mrs. Elton in America has also recently been published. As I understand it, she wrote her first one (I can't remember whether it was Mrs. Darcy's Dilemma) long before sequelizing Austen became a trendy thing to do but was unable to get it published at that time. She's not following the trend just to be in fashion, having been a longtime active member of AUSTEN-L and the Jane Austen Society of North America - but as I have found in knitting, sometimes doing something that happens to be in fashion makes it considerably easier to get the resources you need to do what you want to do. The longterm immersion in all things Austen has obviously benefitted the book: the language is nearly perfect, which is an immense relief. It's upsetting to be reading something supposed to belong to a certain period and to be violently cast out of time when some idiot author has King Arthur say, "OK, I'll meet you at 3 o'clock on the dot." (A made-up example, but you get the point.) I thing the most important thing after the language is that the characters are concerned with being and seeming truly good, in a moral sense; a lot of modern authors don't quite get how central that is to characters from Austen to Alcott.
In summary, a recommended romp.
Posted by dichroic at June 1, 2005 02:33 PM