"It is a truth universally acknowledged..." Or is it?
For generations, readers have fallen in love with Fitzwilliam Darcy and measured real-life suitors against Jane Austen's most famous hero. But what happens when the ideal we have cherished since our teenage years begins to collide with reality?
Today, I am delighted to welcome Susan Moore to My Jane Austen Book Club to discuss her new novel, The Darcy List, a witty and thought-provoking contemporary story inspired by a question many Janeites have secretly asked themselves: Did Jane Austen set the bar impossibly high?
At the centre of the novel is Florence Elliot, who at sixteen creates a list of everything the perfect man should be—a "Darcy List" inspired by her favourite literary hero. Years later, life, love, heartbreak, and unexpected opportunities force her to reconsider not only the list itself, but what she truly wants from a partner.
In the interview below, Susan reflects on the enduring appeal of Mr Darcy, the influence Jane Austen continues to have on modern readers, and the difference between loving the idea of someone and learning to embrace someone real.
Please join me in giving Susan a warm My Jane Austen Book Club welcome.
The Darcy List asks
a question that many Jane Austen readers have wondered about: Did Miss Austen
set the bar impossibly high? What inspired you to build an entire novel around
that idea?
The honest answer is that the novel started with a confession
— mine and, I suspect, many other women's. I've spent decades measuring men
against a fictional standard I absorbed at sixteen, when I read Pride and
Prejudice for the first time, and at some point I had to ask myself: is that
romantic, or is it a problem? We don't talk much about the way beloved fiction
can quietly shape — and sometimes distort — our expectations of real life.
What fascinated me most was the gap between the Darcy
we carry in our heads and the Darcy Austen actually wrote. The checklist
version is compelling, but it misses the point of him. His real quality is
accountability: he can be told he is wrong, he considers it, and he changes.
That felt like a much richer and more honest thing to write about. So the novel
grew out of that tension: what happens when a woman who has held the Darcy
ideal all her life keeps encountering men who have his surface but not his
substance? I wanted to hold both truths at once — that Darcy is genuinely
compelling, and that holding out for him might cost you something real.
Can you tell us a little about Florence and the
"Darcy List" she has kept since she was sixteen?
Florence and her best friend Alice are devoted Austen
girls from the start. At sixteen, fuelled by dog-eared copies of Pride and
Prejudice and teenage certainty, they sit down and compile the definitive
list of qualities the ideal man must possess. It's half joke, half blueprint —
and entirely specific. Really fit in all ways. Smart and witty. Can gallop on a
horse, but driving a cool sports car will do.
It's an endearing document, and also, as Florence
comes to understand, entirely the wrong way to approach love. The list names
qualities — it describes someone who has already arrived. What it can't account
for is the real question: not who someone is, but whether they're capable of
growth. That's what takes Florence the rest of the novel to learn.
What does Mr Darcy mean to you personally, and why do
you think he continues to capture readers' imaginations more than two centuries
after Pride and Prejudice was
published?
I think what Darcy means to me personally has shifted
as I've got older. When I was younger, it was absolutely the surface: his
reserve, brooding intelligence, the moment when the mask slips. But what I've
come to love in him — and what I think makes him genuinely indestructible as a
character — is his arc, not his appearance. Austen created a hero whose
greatest quality is the ability to be corrected by someone he loves and not
flinch from it. He doesn't explain away Elizabeth's refusal. He doesn't sulk.
He goes away and thinks, and when he comes back, he has genuinely changed
because he knew she was right. That's rarer, in fiction and in life, than we'd
like to think. I believe readers sense that — they sense that the real Darcy is
not the proud man at the ball but the man who writes the letter.
Were there any particular Austen themes or characters
that influenced this story beyond Mr Darcy himself?
Elizabeth Bennet is everywhere in this book, even
though Florence is not a straight parallel. What I admired in Elizabeth, and
tried to honour, is that she refuses to accommodate male pride as though it
were simply her social duty. She calls Darcy out, walks away, and maintains her
own judgment even when the pressure to capitulate is enormous. Florence has to
learn her way to that kind of self-possession. She starts the novel deferring
to what love is supposed to look like rather than trusting her own instincts
about what it actually feels like.
There's also something of Austen's comedy of manners
running through the book — the social dynamics, whether in rural England or
California society, each with its own rich absurdity. And I've always been
drawn to Austen's quiet insistence that women's inner lives are serious — that
what a woman thinks and feels and wants matters, even when the world around her
doesn't quite agree. That felt urgently relevant to a contemporary story.
Contemporary fiction and Austen-inspired fiction do
not always overlap. What drew you to bring Austen's influence into a modern
setting?
I was less interested in retelling Austen than in
asking what her legacy does to us — specifically to women who grew up loving
her. That felt like a contemporary story rather than a historical one. Florence
isn't living inside a Jane Austen novel; she's living inside her own life while
haunted by one. The modern setting lets me explore the gap between the world
Austen described and the world we actually inhabit — the compromises, and
confusion. I wanted readers to recognise themselves, not in the bonnets and
drawing rooms, but in the private knowledge that they still, somewhere, believe
in Darcy.
Without giving too much away, what challenges does
Florence face when real life refuses to follow the script she imagined for herself?
Florence is warm, funny, and perceptive about almost
everyone around her, and yet she has a profound blind spot about what she
herself deserves. The men who seem to fit the list turn out to be performances
rather than people, and she endures far more than she should before she can
admit it.
She comes to realise that the list she has clung to all her life has actually been a defence. Wanting someone perfect is a very effective way of not having to risk wanting someone real.
There's external hardship too: grief, a costly marriage, and a pub renovation undertaken largely on hope. But the real challenge is interior. Florence is brave in most areas of her life. Trusting her own judgment about love takes her the longest.
Your forthcoming LitHub essay explores why we're still
looking for Mr Darcy. Could you give our readers a small preview of your
thoughts on that question?
The essay starts from the observation that the
interesting question isn't why we love Darcy — that's well established — but
what it says about us that we keep returning to a character whose defining
quality is his capacity to change.
Because Darcy isn't, at the outset, particularly
loveable. What makes him immortal is what happens after Elizabeth refuses him.
He doesn't change to win her back. He changes because he comes to recognise
that she was right. That distinction matters. Rochester is reshaped by
circumstance; Heathcliff is consumed by it. Darcy's arc is genuinely moral, not
merely emotional. He is corrected by love, and he chooses to be.
The essay also pushes back against the modern instinct
to say "find someone who has already done the work." Darcy's story
isn't the "fix the difficult man" fantasy people rightly distrust,
because Elizabeth doesn't fix him. She refuses him and walks away. He goes
home, thinks, and writes a letter that is an act of accountability rather than
self-justification.
What was the most enjoyable aspect of writing The Darcy List?
Florence's voice, without a doubt. She has a dry,
self-deprecating wit that I found genuinely joyful to inhabit — she narrates
her own disasters with such fond exasperation that even her worst moments have
warmth. I also loved writing the friendship between Florence and Alice, which
is really the emotional backbone of the whole novel. That friendship — the
constancy of it, the way it holds through grief and distance and poor decisions
— is in some ways the great love story of the book. And I loved the pub
renovation, which gave me the chance to write about practical, physical,
unglamorous hard work, which I think fiction doesn't always make room for.
If Jane Austen could read your novel, what do you hope
she might say about it?
I hope she'd find the comedy sympathetic. She was so
precise about human self-deception — particularly our habit of telling
ourselves we want one thing while chasing something entirely different — and
I'd love to think that Florence's journey from the Darcy List to something real
might have made her smile. I also hope she'd approve of the fact that Florence,
ultimately, does not compromise herself for love. She earns the right to be
chosen by first becoming, fully and at considerable cost, her own person. I
think Austen would have had something rather dry and pointed to say about
Chase, and I rather wish I could have heard it.
Finally, what would you most like readers to take away
from The Darcy List?
That the list is worth examining — whatever form yours
takes. We all carry ideals we absorbed when we were young, and they shape what
we look for and what we overlook in ways we don't always notice. I'd love
readers to finish the book feeling gently challenged rather than lectured — to
close it and think, perhaps for the first time, about the gap between the love
story they imagined and the one that might actually be waiting for them. And I
hope they feel that Florence's journey, for all its complications, is
ultimately hopeful. Not naively so — but genuinely so. Real love, messy and
surprising as it is, turns out to be better than the list.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Moore spent over three decades in film, technology and media — including time at Lucasfilm's Skywalker Ranch in California — before turning to fiction. She holds an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from Kingston University, London, and is the author of seven books, including The Widow's Web and the Nat Walker Trilogy. The Darcy List is her latest novel. She lives in the UK and believes that a Darcy obsession and a happy life are entirely compatible.
ABOUT THE BOOK
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