Review by TeresaAF

Among the plethora of Jane Austen novel retellings, sequels, and completions, there are several things that irritate me and other Janeites to no end. Capital amongst these offenses has to be misspelled names and places. These stories are often peppered with various misspellings of the surname “Bennett” or of the Darcy estate “Pemberly,” which I find especially hard to forgive.

Thankfully, Sally Smith O’Rourke, author of The Man Who Loved Jane Austen, (not to be confused with the novel of the same name by Ray Smith) seems to have taken great care to not infuriate us by getting the spelling of these names correct. Unfortunately, the author chose to populate her story with character names straight out of Jane Austen’s own books or from among her Chawton relations.

The use of these names, which have absolutely nothing to do with the exposition phase of the story, seem oddly out of place and clumsy. There is a hired hand by the name of Lucas, a cat saddled with the name Wickham, and the heroine is called Eliza–most convenient too, given the fact that the hero of this tale has the honor of actually being a “real” Fitzwilliam Darcy, Jane Austen’s supposed–for this work of fiction, at least–long lost love.

We are almost immediately introduced to Eliza Knight, who has the good fortune to happen upon an antique dressing table at an auction. While in the process of cleaning her purchase, Miss Eliza, an artist and collector, discovers two old letters wedged behind a mirror. One letter has already been opened, and to her astonishment Eliza finds a cryptic message written to Miss Austen, signed by none other than F. Darcy. The other letter, in Jane’s own hand, is still sealed with wax after all these years. With these startling discoveries Eliza believes that the table must have once belonged to Jane Austen herself.

With knowledge she has gleaned from some of the better PBS antiques shows, Eliza knows enough not to open the letter–though obviously not enough to know that antiques cleaning and refinishing is best left to professionals. Her curiosity being acute, she eventually seeks out the advice of a Jane Austen scholar who is suitably frumpy and unattractive, just as all female Jane Austen scholars are expected to be.

Additionally, Eliza posts a question on one of the many Jane Austen-related message boards she finds on the Internet, asking if Fitzwilliam Darcy was based upon a real person–which is just the type of asinine question on certain Austen boards that might very well incur everyone’s wrath.

*fondles Cluebat lovingly* –Ed.

Several hours later, Eliza receives an email reply from an actual Mr. Darcy, which she immediately dismisses as some sort of ludicrous prank. Over the course of the next few days, messages and replies are exchanged in which our heroine tries desperately to shake off her troll, armed with nothing more than her clever witticisms and sparkling repartee.

Our hero, Fitzwilliam Darcy, on the receiving end of Eliza’s cutting remarks, whilst sitting at the computer in his vast library, on the extensive grounds of his great estate, nestled amongst the rolling hills of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is dismayed. You need not ask what the estate is called, for I will give you three guesses, but you are only going to need one.

What follows next is a sequence of predictable Elizabeth Bennet/Fitzwilliam Darcy style meetings and misunderstandings, an unnecessary Caroline Binglyish style side story, and serial three-day courtships, all culminating into the most contrived time-travel plot device employed since the television series Quantum Leap.

Setting aside my disturbing thoughts about the disruption to the space-time continuum, I found that Ms. Smith O’Rourke’s book is not exactly awful. The author does do a fair job of spinning her tale. Readers with less sophisticated tastes just might enjoy this book and I will admit that there were one or two moments that did bring a smile to my lips.

Of course, being an African-American and hailing from the Commonwealth of Virginia, I found myself reduced to fits of laughter at the author’s ridiculous need to describe, several times, for the benefit of her readers, Darcy’s African-American friend’s “beautiful black skin.” Moreover, the author’s belief that a man from old Virginia money such as Darcy would speak with a southern accent was extremely amusing.

Of course I know that this story is one of complete invention; I just wished Ms. Smith O’Rourke had read up a bit more on Jane Austen’s history so that she would have known that Miss Austen often pulled names for her stories from a list of extinct peerages, in which the names Fitzwilliam and D’Arcy (along with Bingley, Wentworth, and Elliot) figured prominently.

Also, there is the widely known fact that as a young girl, Jane Austen wrote her name alongside that of a fictitious Mr. Henry Frederick Howard Fitzwilliam in the parish register of her father’s church in a flight of girlish marriage fantasy. So, if this story was to ring true with its readers at all, those two bits of information should have at least been acknowledged before Ms. Smith O’Rourke dragged Jane Austen’s good name into her preposterous tale of romantic muddles.

Longtime Friend of AustenBlog TeresaAF has written a spot of JA paraliterature herself. Check out her Web site, Elegant Extracts. We hear that she also has watched a few PBS antiques shows in her time…paging Leigh Keno, Mr. Keno, please pick up the white courtesy phone… –Ed.