AUSTENSIBLY JANE

DAY 83

Thirty six pages into Colleen McCullough’s The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet, I realised going back to Pride and Prejudice to relive the exploits of the Bennet family and the inherent characteristics of the Bennet girls in particular would be a helpful exercise before I continued.

That led me into another spin off. Freshly showered after two hours of mowing, with feet up in the recliner and home made latte and ginger nuts by my side (funny how I can only eat ginger nuts with coffee, don’t taste right with herbal tea), I settled into an afternoon’s viewing of The Jane Austen Book Club. Great little movie, not just a chick flick, and you don’t even have to be a Jane Austen fan to appreciate it.

I suspect I am not alone in admitting I only have Pride and Prejudice under my belt as far as covering Jane’s novels are concerned, a favourite of many for its creation of characters Elizabeth Bennet and Mister Darcy and the troubled route of their courtship. Of course, no romance worth its salt would be complete without some drama interwoven into it. If it was all plain sailing it’d be boring. Where are the obstacles, the misunderstandings, the deceit, jealousy, bruised egos? All this and more we need in order to feel fulfilled when our lead characters finally get their act together and finally get together.

One of the characters in The Jane Austen Book Club remarks that Jane never writes about what comes next. What happens after the romance, after the wedding, after the happy ending? And this is where Colleen McCullough’s book becomes of particular interest. Picking up twenty years after the end of Jane Austen’s novel, McCullough brings the Bennet girls to life again, somewhat older but not necessarily wiser, and we see them in a whole new light.

Got me thinking about how Jane Austen devotees would feel about Colleen’s depiction of Jane’s characters. I wondered if she had to get permission from anyone to even write the book. Maybe there’s a Jane Austen Preservation Society somewhere in England which oversees the copyright of Jane’s works and her characters, jealously guarding all things Austen so no one can tarnish the reputation of the author or her creations.

Not sure how Jane would feel about handing over her characters to someone else to manipulate, but I guess it could be seen as a form of flattery, to choose someone else’s creations and breathe new life into them more than 200 years later. As I’m only thirty six pages in, I’ll have to reserve my judgment and get back to renewing my acquaintance with Mister Darcy before picking up where I left off in The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet.