A WEEKEND WITH MR DARCY BY VICTORIA CONNELLY - A REVIEW

 First impressions can last  a lifetime ...

Do you want to spend a perfect weekend with the most charming, dashing heroes and the liveliest , loveliest heroines? Here's a story which is actually sunshine on a rainy day as someone has written in a review.  Victoria Connelly created a balanced blend of modern romance and Austensian features, matter-of-fact nowadays language with Hampshire dreamy landscape,  heroines troubled by modern concerns but romanticly wooed  by handsome gentlemanlike heroes who seem just landed on earth from Jane Austen planet.And then a Jane Austen Conference, regency romances by a contemporary author, horse-riding and a ball, intrigue and misunderstandings, very romantic love plots.  Well ... where Jane Austen is concerned, romance is never very far away...

It's such a lovely, lovely,  lovely novel. You can actually read it in a weekend and even less because it is so difficult to put it down once you've started it. You want to see how the intriguing plots and  the relationships in it develop. You must know how it ends. And it ends well, of course. Very well, as any good Austenesque read has to. 

The plot 

Katherine Roberts is fed up with men. As a lecturer specialising in the works of Jane Austen, she knows that the ideal man only exists within the pages of Pride & Prejudice and that in real life there is no such thing. Determined to go it alone, she finds all the comfort she needs reading her guilty pleasure-regency romances from the pen of Lorna Warwick- with whom she has now struck up an intimate correspondence.

Austen fanatic, Robyn Love, is blessed with a name full of romance, but her love life is far from perfect. Stuck in a rut with her bonehead boyfriend Jace, and a job she can do with her eyes shut - her life has hit a dead end. Robyn would love to escape from it all but wouldn't know where to start. 

Robyn and Katherine decide to attend the annual Jane Austen conference, overseen by the actress and national tresasure, Dame Pamela Harcourt, at sumptuous Purley Hall. Robyn is hoping to escape from Jace for the weekend and indulge in her passion for all things Austen. Katherine is hoping that Lorna Warwick will be in attendance and is desperate to meet her new best friend in the flesh.

But nothing goes according to plan and Robyn is aghast when Jace insists on accompanying her, while Katherine is disappointed to learn that Lorna won't be coming after all. However, an Austen weekend wouldn't be the same without a little intrigue, and Robyn and Katherine are about to get much more than they bargained for. 

The author

Victoria Connelly was brought up in Norfolk and studied English Literature at Worcester University before becoming a teacher in North Yorkshire. After getting married in a medieval castle in the Yorkshire Dales, she moved to London where she lives with her artist husband and a mad springer spaniel. She has three novels published in Germany - the first of which was made into a film. She is the author of "Molly's Millions" -

Visit Victoria Connelly's Site

Read my interview with  Victoria Connelly  
here on MyJane Austen Book

Buy A Weekend with Mr Darcy on 

amazon.UK.com  or bookdepository