She did.

We have wondered, off and on, in our copious free time, about That Other Mr. Darcy’s Diary, and the Daily Mail helpfully fills us in.

It’s an awfully good idea, one of those obvious ones which makes you wonder why it hasn’t been done before — the fictional diary of Mr Darcy

Probably because it has. Three or four times. Where you been, plebe?

Mr Darcy’s Diary’s strengths come from being carefully researched and full of painstaking period detail.

Well, that sounds like a plan!

And Slater adds colour to her hero by giving him lots of interesting friends and acquaintances: Lord Byron is one, trying ever to draw Darcy into acts of madness and badness.

Yeah, right. That’s why he’s hanging around Hertfordshire with Charles Bingley, Son of a Tradesman. Uh-huh.

He succeeds a couple of times, most spectacularly when — in a scene as far from the home life of our own dear Longbourn as it is possible to imagine — Darcy gets busy with two blondes during an orgy at Newstead Abbey.

*falls over laughing*

Honestly, it’s not even shocking anymore. It’s just hilarious. And not in a good way. “Oooh, Darcy has S-E-X! Sexy sex! With whores!” Honestly, this is written by an adult?

More endearing is the Jeeves and Wooster relationship between Darcy and his valet, Peebles

Peebles? Sounds more like his cat. Oh, and making Mr. Darcy into Bertie Wooster? Much as we adore Bertie, we don’t think so.

…who longs to get his master into more blingtastic attire.

That Darcy, he just screams “bling,” doesn’t he?

But then Slater’s Darcy is more of a New Man than Austen’s. He’s emotionally literate and perceptive; his reading of Lydia Bennet as tragic heroine and sacrificial lamb, for instance, borders on the revolutionary. He’s interested in good cooking, sensitive to his men-friends and into social justice and ethical investing (he won’t put his money into the slave trade). He’s cool with homosexuality, too.

In the fan fiction world, recreating a canon character to be The Man You Want Him To Be would fall under the category of Mary Sue and be righteously mocked for the immaturity and just plain bad writing that it represents. That’s right up there with making Legolas a vegetarian Buddhist who falls in love with the indigo-eyed teenaged human girl with flowing raven hair who falls through a time/space/logic anomaly in gym class and ends up in Mirkwood. Just because you’re not a lovestruck fourteen-year-old doesn’t mean you get away with it. We call Mary Sue.

Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link.