The Private Diary Of Mr. Darcy, by Maya Slater

This novel falls prey to one of the main failings of novels about the Regency era written by contemporary writers, and that is the tendency to be cynical about the virtue of people.  This sort of novel reminds me of a lot of contemporary efforts to reframe or continue Pride & Prejudice, and that is a combination of the search for the history of the Regency era a well as a tendency to view people like Darcy and Bingley, and not only them, as being only as righteous and upright and moral as contemporaries in our generation or the worst of the people of the time from which they lived.  While this tendency to sex up Pride & Prejudice certainly works to make the story more appealing and relatable to contemporary audiences, it does no credit to the character of the men of this story, who are nearly uniformly viewed in a cynical and negative fashion.  Indeed, Darcy himself comes off particularly poorly here, in an astonishing lack of scruples taken to the behavior of Lord Byron, who is viewed as a friend of Darcy rather than one he would not even admit to being acquainted of if his behavior in Pride & Prejudice can be believed.

This book is framed as part of the diary of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy during the period that takes place in Pride & Prejudice as if he had been a real landowner who Austen had known and slightly fictionalized for her writing purposes.  The diary follows the same chronology and it tends to show Darcy’s mostly brief but occasionally very long-winded comments about who he saw, what business he was about, and how he reflected upon his actions.  The section of the diary ends with a discussion of the frame and notes that only a couple of days were illegible and a few others were skipped because they involved business that would not be of interest to the writer of a romance novel, even one as cynical and corrupt as this one is.  Darcy deals with problems involving his servants and is tempted into a loveless marriage of convenience with his cousin, who is portrayed as being consumptive to a high degree.  Some parts of the diary reflect upon Darcy’s general lack of religious scruples and failure to pay attention frequently to sermons and their meaning and make Darcy out to be as cynical as the author herself is likely to be, which shows that as is often the case people take out of Pride & Prejudice the sort of prejudices that they bring into reading it.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with a somewhat more cynical view of the Regency era than some readers are likely to have.  The more one reads about the history of the Regency era, the more one is likely to question the high regard that novelists have had for the period as a way of copying Austen, Hayer, and others.  That said, a great part of the power of Pride & Prejudice as a novel is the way that Austen explores the downside of a stern moral rectitude and how it can be viewed as intolerable pride.  Understanding Darcy to be a hypocrite does not in any way improve our lack of understanding of the times in which Elizabeth and Darcy are placed.  Jane Austen herself was not lacking in cynicism or wit–both are on full display in her novels and letters–but her restraint and decorum allowed those elements to beautify her work rather than to make it less pleasing as is the case here.  The author would have done a much better job to have sought to understand Darcy sympathetically and accurately from Pride & Prejudice and then write from his perspective, if she continued to have the confidence that she could do such a man justice.  This book, alas, does not.