Darcy’s Story, by Janet Aylmer

This book does something worthwhile that is harder to do than it might seem at first, and that is to rearrange and reframe the story of Pride & Prejudice while retaining as much as possible the same spirit of restrain and decorum that was present in the original.  This is a surprisingly difficult task to undertake because of the temptation to err too much in one direction or the other.  Either someone can add nothing new to the information provided and thus make the effort rather pointless or someone tries to go for drastic change that makes the characters far less appealing.  What this book does is show Darcy as a reserved and awkward person but by no means a bad one, and gives him good reason to feel proud in his rectitude and in his position as a gentleman until he is shocked that Elizabeth views him as deficient in these aspects, which in turn allows him to come to respect his sister as a woman rather than a child.  Some of the events are discussed in a different order as well, based on how Darcy would have come to know them, and this has an effect on how we view Darcy as well, for the better.

This book is a bit less than 300 pages and it is remarkable how short the book is based on how much the book takes from Pride & Prejudice.  The author believes, and I think this a sensible approach, that there is simply much less to say about Darcy’s interior life.  It is not that he is lacking in this area, but rather he engages in less of the rumination and reflection and overanalysis that we see from Elizabeth Bennet, whose life is made up of few but important interactions, as opposed to Darcy, who is an active man of the world who does not seem to cultivate the same sort of habit of reflection that Elizabeth has.  As a result, Darcy gives less of the sparkling wit, but there is still a lot here to enjoy and at least a few additions that the author provides that show what Darcy was doing behind the scenes in trying to ensure a good life and being unaware of the way that he was being strongly affected by his interest in Elizabeth until he finds himself enraptured by her quite by surprise, and then humbled when he awkwardly fumbles his first proposal.

Given that there is so much that is the same between this book and Austen’s, what this particular book does, and does well, is reframe the book so that we see things from Darcy’s perspective.  And that is a valuable exercise that some readers may do from reading the original but that many will appreciate seeing here.  Yet there is something about this particular book that leads me to ponder why it is that Jane Austen wrote from the perspective of Elizabeth Bennet in the first place.  Austen as a woman was aware of her limitations in understanding men and their motivations and their interior lives, and chose to write novels that depend only on what happens with women alone or when men and women are in each other’s company.  It is striking that many contemporary women lack that restraint when it comes to imagining what guys think and feel in novels.  This novel does that task better than most, but it is still something that bothers me, the presumption that women writers tend to have that they can understand the interior life of men better than men can understand the interior life of women, an assumption that often proves to be deeply wrong.