I’m an insomniac, and I often listen to audio recordings in the early hours. Listening to Prunella Scales reading Emma (a great recording!), I fell to musing on the fact that Mr and Mrs Knightley’s children would grow up Victorians, and what a different world that would be. How and what would their children be like? Naturally, this led to reflections on the offspring of my favourite couple, Darcy and Elizabeth. Unlike the Bennets, their daughters would be rich, and high in the rigid pecking order of English society. What if Mr and Mrs Darcy had, like Lizzy’s parents, five daughters . . . ?
Pride and Prejudice was published in 1814. Twenty years on makes it 1834. So how come Mr Darcy’s daughters are young women in 1818?
That’s because my time frame is based on the original version of the book, First Impressions, which Jane Austen wrote in 1796/7. To me, Jane Austen is very much a product of the eighteenth century, her clear mind and satirical eye not that impressed by the turbulent emotionalism of the Romantic movement. Others have the same idea – the recent film of Pride and Prejudice was set in the late eighteenth century.
Elizabeth and Mr Darcy don’t appear as characters in your books – why is this?
Because I would never use the main characters from another novel in a book I wrote.
So which Jane Austen characters are in your books?
You can see the list in characters. I found it very interesting to speculate on how these minor characters from Pride and Prejudice might have changed and developed. Some readers take issue with my portrayal of Mr (Col.) Fitzwilliam twenty years on, but this was the time when men were becoming more interested in family life, and more controlling in the domestic arena, so I saw him turning into the kind of paterfamilias that became more and more common as the century went on.
Do you try to write in Jane Austen’s ‘voice’?
Even if I wanted to, it would be impossible! And I don’t want to. I’m not in any way setting out to mimic Jane Austen’s style or write a pastiche.
Why not?
For one thing, Jane Austen’s glorious, perfect narrative voice isn’t in keeping with the way we write books today. It’s a matter of fashion as much as anything else: modern editors would say that anything written in Jane Austen’s style was ‘tell, not show’ and full of ‘authorial intrusion’!
So why write sequels to Pride and Prejudice?
I don’t. My books are variations on a theme by Jane Austen – five sisters and the world of the Darcys. That’s one reason why I set them in London and abroad, and after the period of Jane Austen’s novels.
You put some scenes and incidents in your books of a kind which you’d never find in Jane Austen – you have a foot fetishist, and one character is called a sodomite, which people today find very offensive. And another character is into flagellation. Why?
Sodomite was the word used in 1818 for a homosexual, and, like it or not, homosexuality was a crime and could carry the death penalty. Would Jane Austen use the word? Of course not, because when she was writing, decorum decreed that there were whole areas of experience and behaviour which would never find their way into print in a novel published for a general readership.
It doesn’t mean she didn’t know the word – that’s her eighteenth century upbringing again! David Noakes’s brilliant biography (my favourite) shows what she would have read and known about subjects like this – I loved finding out from his book that Mary Bennet was the name of the local whore in Jane Austen’s village.
After all, Jane Austen famously never mentions the Napoleonic wars, yet with naval brothers, she knew all about it. And there is that sly reference to flagellation in Mansfield Park, where Maria Crawford declares, “Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices, I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.”
So why don’t you follow the same rules of decorum?
Because I’m writing as an historical novelist in the twenty-first century, and I can therefore choose a broader canvas.
Are you working on another Darcy novel?
No. I've taken a break from the nineteenth century, and my new book, Writing Jane Austen, set in the present day, is out next spring.
Can you sum up what you hope the reader gets from reading your books?
In the words of my favourite review from the Chicago Sun Times: “Great characters, great comic moments, great romance.”.
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