In Relation To Pride and Prescience

Written by Carrie Bebris; Book One in the Mr. & Mrs. Darcy Mysteries

Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet are now Mr. and Mrs. Darcy. But, to Elizabeth's vexation, their joint wedding reception with the new Mr. and Mrs. Bingley is marred by Caroline Bingley's engagement announcement. Miss Bingley and her fiance, an American named Mr. Parrish, seem determined to steal the attention of society away from the former Miss Bennets and their new husbands, planning an extremely elaborate wedding ceremony in London just one week after their engagement announcement. Elizabeth's vexation at Miss Bingley's pretentiousness is gradually lessened, however, as the vain young woman begins to act increasingly strangely - to the point of trying to kill herself.

I am not a huge fan of fan fiction. In fact, I think authors who write fan fiction are poor writers; a truly great writer would invent his or her own characters, without having to rely on someone else's creations. Stories are important, but it's the characters that really bring a book to life.

With such a low opinion of fan fiction books, I went into this one with trepidation. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy may well be my favorite literary couple of all time, and the last thing I wanted was to see their characters ruined. I was pleasantly surprised, at least with regard to Mr. Darcy. His character is portrayed faithfully; firm, honorable, and madly in love with Elizabeth (though perhaps he has a little better sense of humor than Austen gave him). Elizabeth is not as faithfully shown, however. A rather big deal is made of her wonderful perceptiveness at times, which is utterly ridiculous considering how unperceptive she turns out to be in Jane Austen's original story. Jane and Bingley are perfect, though I would have liked them to be in the story a bit more than they were.

While the characters are much like they're supposed to be, I'm afraid the writing style is not quite true. While I don't mind some sentences being modernized (after all, no one reads books filled with double negatives nowadays), I didn't care for the modernized dialogue. At select times it was excruciatingly painful. I highly doubt the expressions "handle it" or "check on" had been invented at the time of Austen's classic. If they were, they were not used among polite society.

The dialogue was a little tiresome; the story was more tiresome still. The resolution was much too obvious for my taste; I had almost all the details worked out little more than halfway through the book. Furthermore, I got the distinct impression that the authoress was intentially trying to imitate the kind of story one might find in a gothic novel. The book revolved around the supernatural, something that evidently showed up often in gothic novels. However, I highly doubt Austen would have approved of her characters being transplanted into these novels. After all, Northanger Abbey is practically a satire of gothic novels' mysterious and mystical elements.

My Rating: T (non-religious supernatural elements, slightly gruesome murder, thematic elements)

Picture from carriebebris.com