The third part of Pamela Aidan's Pride and Prejudice from Darcy's point of view. Darcy has a cousin named D'Arcy. Darcy's best friend is not Colonel Fitzwilliam, whose first name is Richard, or Charles Bingley, but someone else whom I would expect to see in other Aidan books if I were ever forced to read her further, because he and his other concerns are so damn random.
This book had to pack in everything from a month after the ball at Netherfield to the denouement since the second had fuck-all to do with our Jane's book. It was longer, about which I feel sort of like Groucho Marx's two restaurant patrons: "The food here is so bad!" "Yes, and in such small portions!" Aidan, for all her length, didn't treat everything she should have, nor treat as well as she should have what she did address.
The first book left Darcy in no doubt of Elizabeth's feeling for him, and I wondered how Aidan was going to manipulate him into believing her desiring and expecting his addresses. Answer: clumsily and insufficiently.
Col. Fitzwilliam might have been a flirt, but he did honestly like Elizabeth. His comment to her about younger sons not marrying where they might prefer is to warn himself as much as to explain to her. But Aidan reduced him to only being diverted by Elizabeth.
Aidan did not escape the anachronisms that plague this sort of thing. Don't make Darcy say "I'm going to be ill" just because that sounds more highfalutin to Usan ears. He would have said, if he were nauseated (not "nauseous"), "I'm going to be sick," just as contemporary Brits do. It's only in Usan English that "sick" has come to be a slangier synonym for "ill"; British has retained the vomiting connotation. She did try to place the book in its political context, but aside from Boney's rearing his little man's head and the war of 1812, I am too ignorant to know whether she did so successfully. That's nice. But there's no reason to write "o'erspread" instead of "overspread." It's prose, not poetry, and it's the 21st century, not the 19th.
And because it's the 21st century, I read Aidan's plural possessives [Gardiner's] as errors. Jane can write [her's]. No imitator may, and I don't think even Jane wrote constructions like [the Gardiner's carriage].
Aidan skimped on the elements I was most looking forward to--Darcy's confession to Bingley and Darcy asking Mr. Bennet for Elizabeth's hand--and completely omitted, thus demonstrating an inability that should perhaps clued her in to keep her mitts off my book, any interaction between Darcy and Mrs. Bennet after the successful proposal. Plus she made the last wedding a single instead of a double.
Mleah. I am well shut of them. I am giving the three to the friend of a friend who Friday discovered she is gravely ill (see, I said "ill" instead of "sick" because it sounds more formal, as befits her grim prognosis) and whose father died yesterday. Happy happy! The gift of diverting, tawdry books to feel superior to is better suited to a hospital stay than a bereavement and I could have given them to her on Tuesday, when the third arrived and before the death, if I hadn't had to read it myself first. No gift without some touch of selfishness.