First of all Stan, let me welcome you to our online book
club. I’m really glad you’re here to introduce yourself and present your new
book to our readers.
Thank you very much
for having me. I think yours is one of the most appealing and impressive websites
devoted to the works of Jane Austen, and I marvel at how you manage to keep it
up with all your other jobs: wife and mother, teacher, and two other blogs! Well
done!
Well, thank you very much, Stan. Blogging is a very
engaging but very rewarding hobby for me. Now let’s focus on you, instead and of
course, my first question is: “How did
it come that you decided to write your own version of Pride and Prejudice”?
My introduction to
Jane Austen was the Keira Knightly / Matthew Macfadyen movie in 2005; I was in
my 50’s then. I was caught immediately, even though most Austen fans think it
one of the worst versions ever made; I began reading all her novels, followed
by the rest of the movie and TV productions. When I ran out of those, a friend
introduced me to another trilogy. While I was at first delighted simply to be
back in the world created by Jane Austen, subsequent readings left me
unsatisfied (I should say that I wolf down new books like a starving man at his
first meal; then, once sated, I go back to savour it with a more discriminating
palate). The Darcy in that series, while certainly well-written, bothered me
enough that I felt the need to attempt it myself; I almost felt as if someone
of my acquaintance had come off badly in the press, and that I needed to
correct it. The one thing that troubled me most was that this Darcy did not, to
my mind, act the way a man really would. Then I went back to P & P and
asked myself if Austen’s Darcy could be more fully imagined in the way I would
expect a man to act; and, to no one’s surprise, I’m sure, I found that he
could. Over time, what had started off as a purely personal quest to fill in
the gaps Austen left for us, turned into a larger project.
