Mrs Darcy’s Dilemma – Diana Birchall

I’ve had this book for a year – it was a present from Diana (we’re members of the same online reading group and I definitely consider her a friend, which is by way of a slight disclaimer before I go on) and I should have read it long ago. When it arrived I thought it would be perfect Christmas reading, and then it was August again. Diana sent it to me after a longish tirade on my part about sequels and prequels (not dissimilar to the one below) and after my ‘Persuasion’ reread the time seemed ripe for exploring what for want of a better description I’m going to call fan fiction. It seemed only right to put a bit of effort into the business which is why I read ‘Murder at Mansfield Park’ too.

‘Mrs Darcy’s Dilemma’ takes us to Pemberley 25 years on; Elizabeth and Darcy are a happily married couple with three grown children enjoying an altogether satisfactory life until a charitable impulse to invite the less fortunate Lydia’s two eldest daughters for Christmas promises to turn everything upside down. Bettina is truly her parent’s daughter, bold, vulgar, and pushing, Cloe on the other hand seems to be something of a cross between the young Elizabeth and Jane, the sort of young woman no one would really object to having in the family. Sadly for the Darcy’s it’s Bettina who first manages to extract an engagement out of the elder Darcy boy, and then runs off to be his mistress. Will the better suited Cloe and Henry manage to get over the obstacles presented by such an amoral sister?

Rachel from Bookssnob commented that she couldn’t stomach the idea of Austen sequels, and I’m not dissimilar – so why you ask read two in a week? Well I used to hate olives, but I’m coming round to them now, and because often these books sound interesting – there’s a new one out in a week or two ‘Charlotte Collins’, and she’s a character who fascinates me; John Sutherland suggests that it’s Charlotte who tells Lady Catherine what’s going on between Elizabeth and Darcy in answer to the question ‘Who betrays Elizabeth Bennet?’ I don’t like to believe it but the evidence does point that way... But I won’t be reading this book or any others like it in the foreseeable future.

The thing is that I found myself having the same problems with ‘Mrs Darcy’s Dilemma’ that I had with ‘Murder at Mansfield Park’. The character that really came alive for me here was Bettina, she’s not necessarily likable (although I suspect I’d like her more than her sister) but she’s interesting. Instead of marriage she settles for lovers and a career on the stage. The family want to rehabilitate her in a cottage but she’s having none of it, her way she can have fun as well as independence, avoiding in the process the unhappiness and struggle that marriage to a feckless drunkard has caused her mother. It quickly became Bettina’s story I wanted to read. Cloe sets out to earn her own keep as well, but as a governess to the Collins family which means she eventually finds herself at Longbourne – her mother’s childhood home, but as an employee rather than a family member in a situation which makes it clear how precarious life could be for women of humble means.

My other problem is that books which use another authors cast really bring out the obscurantist (lovely thesaurus alternative for pedant that I’m going to try and casually work into conversation whenever I can from now on) in me which doesn’t improve my reading pleasure. I don’t want to find myself asking if something rings true or not, I want to be happily immersed and oblivious, and I can’t do that if I’m constantly comparing to Jane Austen, or when I’m comparing to my own very fixed ideas of what the future would have held for much loved characters. In short it’s still a genre that eludes me though I’m now prepared to admit that there are some decent books in it even if they’re not for me. So Diana, if your work here isn’t quite through, you have at least dispelled the worse of my prejudices!

Murder at Mansfield Park – Lynn Shepherd

I have something of a prejudice about all the Jane Austen (and beyond) sequels, prequels, re writes, fan fiction, industry – I’m not even sure what to call it, but whatever it is, it seems to be a rapidly growing sub genre so I wanted to put any bigotry of my own to one side and investigate a little bit. The root of this intolerance probably started with ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’. I think I might have been a bit young when I read it, far too young to have grown out of the idea of Rochester as a romantic hero at any rate and it was all a bit above my head. And then I had a bad experience with an Emma Tennant – I think it was ‘Pemberley’, a reading experience so hideous I shudder to recall it.

Since then zombies and sea monsters have invaded and made themselves very much at home. For some reason I can look at a copy of ‘Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter’ and smile, but ‘Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters’ makes me almost froth at the mouth. It’s a lot to do with the marketing, which has been undeniably clever, but it frustrates me to see these books in ‘classics’ sections – the mash up thing is (I feel) a joke, not even a very sophisticated joke, but if you enjoy it that’s fine, it’s just not working for me. I suspect though that a healthy proportion of units shifted are destined not to be read – and I think that’s what bothers me most, these don’t entirely feel like books to be read but units to be sold, a cynical exercise in money making.

Perhaps you can guess that I approached ‘Murder at Mansfield Park’ with a bit of baggage attached – idle to deny it, but I did make a real effort to come at it open minded and I was in exactly the mood for something light, fun, and slightly gory. It helped that ‘Mansfield Park’ is my least favourite Austen novel – I’ve read it only once, a long time ago, and frankly the details are very hazy. The end result is that I enjoyed this – with reservations. There’s a cracking heroine, a worthy victim (she really does deserve a crack over the head, and it’s hard to be sorry when she gets it), some excellent potential villains and villainesses, and an interesting detective. So far so good. I would need to re read ‘Mansfield Park’ to get a grip on exactly what Shepherd has done with it, but it’s safe to say she’s re worked or changed a lot – all good as far as I’m concerned, because the bits that seem furthest from Austen are the bits I liked most.

Approaching ‘Murder at Mansfield Park’ from the murder side it’s pretty good (although annoyingly the questions for book groups section at the back has quite a few spoilers in it – a warning wouldn’t have gone amiss there). The detective (thief taker) Charles Maddox is a worthy addition to the genre, suitably dark, complex, and charismatic, Mary Crawford (the heroine) makes an excellent foil for him, and I couldn’t help but wish at times that the book I was reading was essentially their case book. Mary is a particularly likable heroine as well, intelligent, spirited, capable – and more than a suggestion of a good back story, all of which brings me round to another of the reasons I don’t think this genre is for me.

The first question in the reading group section asks if it’s legitimate to keep re working Austen in this way. Well if you want to why not, but the question I would ask in return is this – why set yourself up for comparison to Jane Austen, how many writers can really measure up to her? The language Shepherd uses is clearly meticulously researched, but I couldn’t help but feel there was something a little self conscious about it. It doesn’t always read as entirely natural, yet re reading ‘Persuasion’ a couple of weeks ago I was struck again at how fresh Austen’s prose is. The comparison to Jane makes me far more pedantic than I would normally be and that’s hardly fair on the book I’m reading. Another question that bothers me is this; why constrain yourself with someone else’s plot and characters?

If I was scoring this book (which I’m not really) it would be a 3.5 out of 5, I found it a very satisfactory page turner and I’m extremely hopeful that Shepherd will return to Maddox, taking care to provide him with a suitable replacement for Mary Crawford, but I’m equally hopeful that her next book will owe a bit less to Austen. I think she’s too good a writer to need to re work someone else’s vision. If however you don’t share all my prejudices and in fact actively enjoy re worked Austen I doubt you could do much better than ‘Murder at Mansfield Park’.