Reports of Jane Austen's death must have been greatly exaggerated -- she is obviously alive and well and living in California. And at last she has decided to publish her long-awaited sequel to Pride and Prejudice.
You may wonder if we need another sequel to P&P, especially when you consider that Pemberley, that site for everything and anything to do with Austen, lists another 49 of them. As I have never read any of these, I can't make any comparisons. All I can tell you is that the pleasure of reading this one was almost a great as finding that a new, original JA manuscript had been unearthed. Here are all those people we know and love so well, and they speak and behave just as we always knew they would if they were twenty-five years older. Yes, twenty-five years have passed since Elizabeth married Darcy, and the marriage has been a great success. They have three children. Fitzwilliam, the oldest, is a slight anxiety to his mother:
"A tall, heavy young man, not uncomely, with well-cut features, he had little of his mother's liveliness or his father's cleverness and would sit of an evening, not saying much, but turning over the sporting papers". The second son, Henry, "more promising and quick-minded", is -- like all younger sons -- destined for the church, while Jane, aged seventeen, is "a girl of quick comprehension and movement; light and airily formed, like her mother, and given to a style of impulsive wit that sometimes, it must be admitted, went too far". The plot turns on the adventures and love affairs of these three young people, and the different ways in which they react to the world and the experiences it throws them cause Darcy and Elizabeth to puzzle over the fact that, though they have had a similar upbringing, each of the three has turned out so differently. This, of course, is a much-debated issue raised by all Austen's novels -- why are Jane and Elizabeth so good and moral, while Lydia is so feckless? How did Edmund Bertram become such a goody goody when his two sisters and his brother seem completely lacking in moral fibre? How could the same parents have produced Eleanor's sense and Marianne's sensibility? And so on. The Darcys here conclude that, being the firstborn, Fitzwilliam was more 'indulged' as a child. Whatever the cause, he certainly does behave rather wildly, though he is drawn into that by one of Lydia's daughters, the gorgeous, ambitious Bettina. Unlike her younger sister Cloe, who is sweet-natured and kind and resigned to a future as a governess, Bettina wants money, nice clothes, male admiration, and an exciting life in London. Her views on sexual morality are quite a shock to the Darcys: "Committing fornication does not make you bad, and chastity does not make you good", she boldly declares. Elizabeth, though amazed, takes this rather well: "Her reasoning is wrong, it is perverted in support of a false truth, yet somehow it almost makes you respect her".
If you ever speculated about what happened to Lydia and Wickham, to Kitty and Mary, to the Collins's, to Jane and Bingley and to his sisters, all the answers are here, and I was completely convinced by them all. If you ever wanted -- or dreaded -- another encounter with Lady Catherine de Bourgh, look no further. And I was truly amazed by Diana Birchall's ability to reproduce Austen's use of language without a single false note. Coming from me, that is a huge compliment, as language, or the use thereof, is something I am rather boringly over-sensitive to, which often causes me huge problems when I read historical fiction. So all in all, this was a really enjoyable read.
