Little did Jane Austen think, as she glanced over the lush, green fields of Hampshire putting the final touches to Pride and Prejudice's Mr Darcy, his breeches and fine estate that, 200 years later, a Limerick woman would be peering over the ditches of Caherline and Dromkeen, while out walking, conjuring up conversations between its less dashing characters for her book The Longbourn Letters – The Correspondence between Mr Collins and Mr Bennet. And although millions of women (and possibly a number of men) the world over, have fallen in love with Darcy, I dare any of them (to a duel) to compete with my love for those two men.
I blame Austen, of course, for her genius is in creating the most amazing minor characters who cannot be met with elsewhere. Where, for example, in literature do we meet with Mr Collins’ equal? And when we think of strong, overbearing, grandes dames such as Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Agatha, The Importance of Being Earnest’s Lady Bracknell and, more recently, Downton Abbey’s Dowager, Violet Crawley, who was their forerunner but Lady Catherine de Bourgh? Even the resigned, socially-scoffing and witty Mr Bennet does not require great wads of pages to reveal his personality in full, for he too is painted perfectly and economically by Austen. I would go so far as to say that her minor characters are as interesting as her main characters – they do not always have to appear in the scene before us for us to sense their presence near by and their lives playing out in the background.
But to get back to my two men, my heroes! I have heard many learned folk state that Austen avoided the serious topics of the day and instead chose to dwell on universal themes – love being the main one. I would like to add that if putting up with annoying relatives is not a universal theme, then I don’t know what is. I have travelled the world and noticed it a commonplace occurrence, whether I was staying with a multi-generational family in a one-roomed hut in the rainforests of Laos, attending a village wedding in India or a funeral in Kerry. The common saying “you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your relatives” seems to ring loud and clear where’er I go.
When I considered the relationship between Mr Bennet and Mr Collins, as portrayed in Pride and Prejudice, I felt I knew so much about it although so little was written. It is a key relationship in the novel, with Mr Collins set to inherit the Longbourn estate on Mr Bennet’s death. He even plans on becoming Mr Bennet’s son-in-law by proposing to one of his daughters but, much to Mr Bennet’s immense relief, his plan is foiled and he gladly settles for the Bennets’ neighbour, Charlotte Lucas. This union further increases his presence at Longbourn as visits to the neighbourhood are more frequent.
We know the two men write to each other as there are four letters between them in Pride and Prejudice yet we are told that Mr Bennet is a reluctant and unreliable correspondent. And although Mr Collins’ company is irksome to Mr Bennet (who encourages his cousin not to visit often for fear of risking the displeasure of his noble patroness) we know that he derives great enjoyment from Mr Collins’ letters. He tells his daughter Elizabeth “I would not give up Mr Collins’ correspondence for any consideration”.
It was this line that triggered my envisioning their letters – the stories and intrigues that they may contain and transcribe them to paper. I wondered if their relationship could evolve over time as life threw both good and bad their way. Would there still be repulsion, a desire to avoid or would there be a new willingness to accept and to allow engagement and good will? In a nutshell, can a cynic become more tolerant and can a gombeen become less annoying?
Such strange questions to ask and yet there was no other book that I wanted to write and certainly none that would entertain me as much in the writing. I laughed the whole way through. There is nothing new about writing a variation of Jane Austen’s classic tale but creating one, like mine, that is not a romance (Alone with Mr Darcy), erotic (Mr Darcy’s Pole/Spank Me, Mr Darcy)or involving zombies (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) is certainly walking into uncharted territory.
I may have accidentally invented a new genre – Georgian bromance, as well as resuscitating the epistolary novel, which died a death in the late 1700s and has rarely been seen since. The Longbourn Letters has been receiving five-star reviews from both Austen fans and those less acquainted with her work. It has been described by the Jane Austen Regency World magazine (yes, there are thousands of us around the globe – Austen-Trekkies, in a way) as “a glorious epistolary novel that mixes laugh-out-loud hilariousness with serious social comment and..touching sentiment” and yet it does not require any previous familiarity with Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for I (cunningly) include a summary in the preface (so that friends and family could not escape the obligatory reading of my book!!)
Jane Austen was my age (41) when she died and yet in her short time on Earth, she created many great works – always peppered with disarming humour. I am forever grateful to her for inventing Mr Collins and Mr Bennet. They have been my constant companions for some time now, have added greatly to my enjoyment of life and, in this her bicentenary year, I could not ask for better company.
