Alert Janeite Joan Ellen wrote to tell us that Jane Odiwe, author and illustrator of the lovely Effusions of Fancy, has a book coming out called Lydia’s Story. She has set up a page for the book at her Web site, where she has posted some of her illustrations and wrote a little about the book.

Lydia’s Story is a book I thought could not be written. Who, after all, could like a girl who is badly behaved, who has little regard for propriety and who is described as being vain, ignorant, idle and uncontrolled? I confess I was intrigued by her character and her story, though I resisted putting my ideas down on paper for some time. But Lydia refused to go away and so did the questions I wanted answering. Why and how did she and Mr. Wickham actually get together? We know they must have been thrown together in Brighton but I wanted to know the details, especially as it seemed they did not take much notice of one another in Meryton, or so I thought until I started to write the book! It is one of the surprises of Pride and Prejudice that Lydia and Mr. Wickham elope to London and of course it is a shocking revelation when we first read the book. But despite this foolhardy act, I wanted to write her side of the story. Lydia, it seemed to me had always been given a bad press and though she should not have risked her reputation or that of her sisters by running away with Mr. Wickham, I felt rather sorry for her. It is clear that Lydia adores George Wickham and she believes his feelings for her are the same as her own. But how does Lydia come to regard him so highly? I wanted to know how their relationship developed from their earliest days in Hertfordshire, to the point of their elopement, marriage and beyond. There were so many questions that puzzled me and as Jane Austen does not tell us all the answers, I felt the only way to guess at what really happened was to write a book about her follies and adventures.

Diana Birchall, herself an Austen paraliterature author, wrote to tell us that she has had a preview of the book, and that it is “very lively and well written. . .I have read her manuscript and think a lot of it.”