The Pemberley Chronicles (The Pemberley Chronicles #1), by Rebecca Ann Collins

As someone who has read more than my fair share of Jane Austen continuation novels, this book is certainly above average in that category.  It is hard for me to say whether or not Jane Austen would have been pleased to see this sort of phenomenon–I suppose a writer would be flattered that other people thought enough of one’s work to create derivative literature from it.  As a reader who greatly enjoys Jane Austen’s writing, though, I find that many continuation novels suffer from the same series of flaws, and though this book does manage to (thankfully) avoid some of the pitfalls, it does not manage to avoid all of them and in particular this book is filled with the tedium of endless political discussions.  Now, the reader of this review should not be under any illusions a to my own lack of interest in talking about or writing about politics.  That said, what makes politics such a negative matter in Jane Austen continuation novels is that writers (and that includes this one) tend to lack any ability to relate to or see as legitimate any principled or conservative or restrained politics, and so of course everyone here is some kind of radical.  Of course.

As far as the plot of this book is concerned, it is rather episodic in nature.  Jane Austen’s novels are rather compact in that they have a narrow sort of story that they wish to convey, namely a young woman finding a husband.  At the point at which the wedding happens, the novels give a bit of a coda of the immediate aftermath of the wedding and its affects on other characters we care about and then we are done. This novel, on the other hand, is more like a chronicle (which is a good name for it) than like Austen’s novels, giving a record of important goings on like births and deaths and weddings and important events like people moving from one place to another or engaging in politics, to the point of running for office, or engaging in business.  By the time the two-part novel reaches its end, there are people getting married who the reader will scarcely know about nor care about because the author has not developed them to any great extent in earlier pages.  Of course, there are plenty of people the reader here will care about, including the core Bennet sisters and their husbands, as well as important secondary characters like the Lucas/Collins families and the Gardiners and others, and makes for generally pleasant reading, most of the time.

If Collins is nowhere near as comic nor as restrained a writer as Austen, it is worth examining what this novel gets right as a way of encouraging other writers.  For one, the author is keenly interested in showing the Pemberley families as being principled and decent people.  If she is somewhat anachronistic in seeing principled people as requiring radical political beliefs, she is at least sensible enough to consider principle in a moral nature as well, as there are no scandalous elopements or people being groomed for the demimonde here as is the case in other Austen continuation novel series that shall remain nameless to protect the guilty.  There are an alarmingly large number of young brides being married by characters who are more than double their age, which I suppose would be something that I would be rather sensitive to, but in all cases in the novel we are dealing with principled men who happen to enjoy bright and energetic teenage girls, which is certainly an attraction I can well understand.  There are deaths here, some of which are quite poignant, and if the novel seems more autumnal than Austen’s writings as a whole, it certainly also shows an England that is far more endangered than Austen let on in her own writing.