Monthly Archives: July 2024

The “Princess of Roumania” Series: My Agoraphobia Experiment

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Reading during the Agoraphobia Experiment

It is Day 4 of the Agoraphobia Experiment.

Amazingly, it is going well.  It is very hot, so it is not difficult to sit indoors with the fan blasting on me.  I am reading – not Jane Austen, because I cannot read Jane incessantly – but a beautifully-written fantasy novel, A Princess of Roumania, the first of a series of four books.

First, let me talk about the agoraphobia.

Many years ago my best friend Anthea moved east and attended a free school.  She began to send me witty but strange letters, characterized by fantasy or lies, depending on how you look at it.  She claimed she had lost all the weight (she was very overweight) and was the homecoming queen.

I knew this could not be true – what free school had a football team, let alone a homecoming queen?

If only she hadn’t moved! Then she would have had friends, and not written those sad, suddenly ultra-conventional letters.

And then Anthea came to visit. She would not leave the house, not  to visit her old friends, not around the block – nowhere.

Her mother said on the phone it had been a problem.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve thought more and more about Anthea.  I always wondered what had happened to her. And no one could find her for school reunions.

Finally I found a snippet saying she had died in her forties.

Not long enough, but long enough to make a difference.

And I have a kind of survivor’s guilt.  If only… if only.. if only… 

This is a book blog, though, and I wanted to tell you about a beautifully-written, charming fantasy novel, The Princess of Roumania, which is the first in a four-book series by Paul Park.  It got great reviews from Michael Dirda at the Washington Post, Locus, The Denver Post, and was blurbed by Ursula K. Le Guin, John Crowley, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

In The Princess of Roumania, Miranda Popescu, a high school student, has been told that she was adopted as a baby in Constantia. Soon she learns she is actually five years older, an adult, and a princess of Roumania. But she loves her adoptive parents , who gave her a perfect childhood, and have presented her with an album the orphanage had kept for her.

One day Miranda leaves the album in a locker at school, and she and her two friends, Andromeda, a popular girl, and Peter, who was born with a birth defect, a stump for a hand, break in to get it.  But after they pick up the album, a group of terrifying men with weapons chase them. They were ordered to hunt her down and bring her to Roumania.

And it turns out that all is illusion. The United States does not exist.  They are in a faux historical U.S., where the English live like Native Americans. Peter, too, is from Roumania, a man in a position of power.  And Andromeda suddenly turns into a dog, with all the knowledge of a dog. 

I am caught in Park’s fantastic web of Roumania, and the writing is superb. The novel goes back and forth between the flight of Miranda in the faux-U.S. and the politics in Roumania.

 One of her family’s enemies, the Baroness Causaeco, is working to find Miranda.  She wants to use Miranda for nefarious political purposes.

The baroness wields magic:  she makes a simulacrum of herself to go to a ball while she herself goes about the business of hunting Miranda.  The simulacrum kills a man.  The police come to see the baroness. The evidence is the simulacrum’s coat.

Here is an example of Park’s stellar writing, about the baroness’s deception of the police. 

The baroness is SO smooth.

Fortune loves the bold, she thought.  She would show him everything, and he would leave the coat and go away.  “Let me show you my husband’s bedroom, she said, as she led him up the stair to the fourth floor, through the bathroom into her beautiful yellow bed chamber with the heavy curtains and the big four-poster bed.  “This is where I sleep now,” she said, and he had the politeness to blush.  Of her husband’s presence in that room, no trace remained. She walled past the bed, whose heavy silk coverlet, she now noticed, showed a mark of dried blood.

Great summer reading, and well-written literature. 

Old Men in Politics and Other Hassles

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Does my vote count in national elections?   In 2016 and 2020, our unfortunately red state elected Trump, mainly because of the electoral college. I feared the same thing would happen in 2020, and it was the same in my state, but Biden won majority of votes in the U.S.   

 I’m not pleased with the majority of politicians, except Bernie Sanders, who is now growing old. 

And we have two very, very old men running for president.  Biden is 81 and Trump is 78.  I’m not saying they’re too old to work behind the scenes, but they are too old to be president, not at the top of their game. Many columnists adamantly think so, as well as ordinary people.

Biden’s presidency has been stable, though his administration has done little for issues like  gun control and climate change.  As for Trump, he is a convicted felon.  Financial fraud?  Shouldn’t that be enough to keep him out of the presidential race?   I paid little attention to his presidency, but was shattered by the his conservative candidates for the Supreme Court, who have reversed Roe v. Wade.

 Biden has served his country, but he spoke in unconnected sentence fragments for a short time during the debate. This has made headlines that go on and on and on. Clickbait:  should Kamala Harris take over?  Or should the Democratic convention consider a great number of other candidates?   Many op/ed writers have no confidence in Harris.  This is sexist,  but on the other hand no woman has ever been elected president in the U.S., so it may also be realism. 

Biden does not want to step down.  His family does not want him to step down.  Many Democrats do not want him to step down. Many Democrats do want him to step down.   My opinion:  he probably should step down.  On the other hand, he does not run the government alone. Many, many experts, aides, politicians, etc.,  have input.  It will be okay, I think, but the country is in chaos. 

At the beginning of  Trump’s campaign in 2016, he said at the State Fair that he would build a wall to keep the Latino immigrants out.  I thought he was joking. When  I found out he meant it, I was stunned. 

On a personal level, though, I was much happier during Trump’s presidency. I have had personal, or should I say interpersonal, difficulties during Biden’s regime. 

Thieves stole the stuff from my bike panniers a few weeks ago.  In London at the National Portrait Gallery, which used to be my favorite museum, a small group of people verbally abused me last fall.  

The horror continues.  Three years after my father’s death, the two executors and lawyer have not settled the estate.  We were promised ir would be settled last August.  Guess what?  A year later…  The law says three years is the limit.

So let us hope all turns out well. 

But not all is well in the U.S.  That is certain.

E. Nesbit’s “The Literary Sense”:  Love & Marriage

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Love and marriage, love and marriage
They go together like a horse and carriage
This I tell you, brother
You can’t have one without the other. -“Love and Marriage,” by Frank Sinatra

Every generation has particular ideas about how to conduct a love affair.  My mother grew up listening to Frank Sinatra, and love and marriage did go together, she thought.  I was so attached to her as a young child that I preferred Sinatra to the Beatles. One of the Beatles’ early songs, “I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” seemed crude after Sinatra’s smoothness. Much later, I stopped listening to both Frank Sinatra and the Beatles, but there is no doubt that their popular songs influenced my ideas about love.

The same can be said of novels. In E. Nesbit’s collection of short stories, The Literary Sense (1903), she explores the idea that reading novels can influence a real person’s love affairs.  When actual people squabble with their lovers, they remember similar scenes in novels and the dramatic reaction of the characters. They often  break up when they do not want to because of their knowledge of fiction. 

In “The Unfaithful Lover,” the characters are referred to only as “he” and “she.”  On a bitterly cold day in London, he asks, “Shall we walk along the Embankment, or go somewhere on the Underground?”

She believes that the Embankment would be more romantic but that he ought to insist on the railroad carriage.  And so she says, “’Oh, the Embankment, please!’ and felt a sting of annoyance and disappointment when he acquiesced.”

Shivering with the cold, they stop in a cafe, and he confesses that he kissed another woman at a dance.  She is not very shocked, but knows from novels that she should be.  She says that she cannot forgive him.  The squabble ends in their break-up, though neither wanted it.  Literature scores a point. 

All of the stories in this collection are thematically tied, and it is a clever idea, but limited.  In one of the best stories, “The Second Best,” Nesbit breaks the formula.  A couple who broke up two years ago have tea together.  The woman is now a widow, and he is a successful lawyer, but they did not know each other’s history since the break-up.  That is ironic and sad, but there is an unexpected twist. The ending is refreshing, a break from the formula.

When I was a child, I loved E. Nesbit’s children’s novels, but her adult work is inconsistent.  She seems more self-conscious when she tries to write for an adult audience.  But The Literary Sense is very clever and contains some of her best writing for adults. It is flawed, but definitely worth reading.

N.B.  It is difficult to find The Literary Sense, but the Read Books LTD  is well above the usual standard of print-on-demand, and this is actually a very attractive paperback.

“Mansfield Park”:  My New Favorite Novel

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What can one say about Jane Austen?  There are so many Jane fans, groupies, common readers, blogger, vloggers, and academics that anything you say will be redundant.  But I am popping in to laud Mansfield Park, which is my new favorite novel by Austen.

I have been acquainted with Jane Austen for years.  When I was 14 I carried a Modern Library edition of the Complete Works of Jane Austen everywhere one summer.  I had no Regency England clothes, but I reinvented Elizabeth Bennet’s look in a prim smocked-and-embroidered dress worn over jeans with Dr. Scholl’s Exercise sandals.  I wanted to live in Pride and Prejudice, and I would be Lizzie, not Lydia (closer to my age), but I was not thinking of the disadvantageous lack of indoor plumbing, running water, and electricity. 

She’s a fan of Mansfield Park, too.

It is a pity the Modern Library printed Austen’s books in order, because I did not enjoy the first novel, Sense and Sensibility.  Pride and Prejudice came as a great relief and I loved it.  And then I discovered the pointedly satiric Emma, which trumped even Pride and Prejudice.   By then I had graduated from Modern Library to the Norton.

Why Mansfield Park, you may ask?

I am fascinated by Austen’s delicate, serious portrait of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, particularly in the latter part of the novel.  Having lived with her aunt, uncle, and cousins at Mansfield Park since she was 10, her visit home as an adult comes is a shock.  Her parents are poor, which of course she knew but the household is noisy and chaotic, which she had forgotten.  The house is dominated by her unruly brothers kicking and stampeding and her sisters fighting over a knife (a utensil, not a weapon), which belongs to Susan. Her mother cannot manage the housekeeping or her children, and sits in a state of exhaustion while the maid does what she wants when she wants:  one doesn’t expect good meals or even tea at the appropriate time.

The Price family’s slovenliness has an effect on Fanny’s health. Fanny is so sensitive that she can  barely stand the noise and the cramped rooms.  The air of the town is stagnant and there is no place to walk.  And then she is burdened by a visit from her unwanted suitor, Mr. Crawford, whom I found utterly charming and who even Fanny admits is courteous and tactful about her family. He has taken on doing good works at the cottages at his estate, and asks her advice.  (Dorothea in Middlemarch might have liked him.) Fanny approves. But of course she does not love him.

Over the years, I have been disappointed by Fanny’s choice of lover. Witty Mr. Crawford seems to fall deeply in love with her, and I do believe in his reform, at least for a while.  Fanny’s choice of lover, her cousin Edmund, who is openly mad about Miss Crawford, Mr. Crawford’s sister, confides in Fanny about his struggle to win her over.  It could be a comedy, but it is not.

This reading, decades after my first reading (I shall not shock you with my age), I paid close attention to Fanny’s thoughts, wishes, and brilliant analyses of character.  Mansfield Park is a very great novel, in the class of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette.

What should you wear at Mansfield Park?  You might want to wear a Regency gown, but is adequate to dress in cropped pants, a linen blouse, and sandals. Or perhaps vintage culottes and an asymmetrical t-shirt.

We need to design Jane Austen reading-wear!

Austen Notes: I Am Not the Kind of Girl Who…

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I am not the kind of woman who travels to England to stalk Jane Austen’s past.

Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

“You wrong me,”I say dramatically. 

My tolerance of tours is limited these days. If I finally get to Bath, the scene of Persuasion and at least one of Austen’s homes,  I will trail after the tour guides in their Regency gowns, bonnets, and ballet slippers, impressed by the depth of their knowledge. But I am not one of those 90-minute tourists. I leave after 30 minutes, maybe 45 if I am fascinated.

It is tea time.

The guides never sit down. 

TOUR GUIDE OATH:  I pledge to wear a Regency gown and bonnet which shall be provided by the costume department of the museum. I pledge to deliver the lecture exactly as written in the script...

A tough job, but perhaps fun.

Jane Austen Shopping Do’s and Don’t’s

Here are suggestions as to what to buy and what not in Bath. We all want different things, I realize.

What a lovely bonnet!

1.  A bonnet.  Pray, pray, pray, don’t buy a bonnet.  There is nowhere to wear a bonnet.  It would look suspicious on a plane, wouldn’t it?  They would X-ray the bonnet.  They would find your lost Jane Austen cameo in the bonnet. They would x-ray it, too. They would find it suspicious.

A bonnet would have been out of place even in my Catholic girlhood, when women had to wear hats to mass. We wore mantillas, never, never the bonnet.

2.  A Jane Austen notebook. .I admit I HAVE a Jane Austen notebook.  It is a blue flex-plastic bound notebook with a saying from Emma on the cover, “You must be the best judge of your own happiness.” When I open the cover of “A Novel journal,” as the manufacturer calls it, it freaks me out a bit because the tiny pink lines actually consist of letters that make up the miniature, presumably abridged text of Emma. 

There are countless Austen notebooks and journals. And they are all so pretty, don’t you think?

3.  Jane Austen stationery.   I am not the kind of girl who buys Jane Austen stationery.  I love stationery, but no one writes letters anymore.  I would resurrect the custom if I could find out what happened to Pam, my Australian penpal in third grade.  But, alas, I don’t remember her last name or address.

I do miss the age of letters. Today it is all phones, social media, and (in my case)  imaginary texting.  “I’ll text you,” I say, holding up a hairbrush and punching imaginary buttons on the handle.  They think I’m joking…until they try to text me…

5.  Yes to all Jane Austen books! You can always use a new copy of Pride and Prejudice or a history of Bath.

Alas, I do not plan to visit Bath immediately.

WHAT DO/WILL/DID YOU RECOMMEND TO DO IN BATH?

The Common Sense of Fanny Price

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There were years when I could not bear Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.  I particularly could not bear Fanny Price.  She was so timid, so prim, so wan, and had nothing of wit about her. 

This time around I’ve had a revelation.  Mansfield Park is not a comedy.  And perhaps that is why this novel does not entirely work.  Jane Austen is so witty that it’s hard to read her straight.  And we expect all the characters to be comical.

But it’s not funny: not really. It is a complex, serious novel – much more so than I had realized. A timid waif is transported to a wealthy estate. Fanny Price is raised by her Aunt and Uncle Bertram at Mansfield Park, because her parents, living in poverty, could not afford to take care of their ever-growing family. And Fanny gradually fits in: her languid Aunt Maria likes her as a restful companion who can fix dropped stitches and embroidery errors, and her older, more glamorous cousins, Maria and Julia Bertram, tolerate her graciously. There is a wicked second aunt, but we won’t write about her here.

Fanny’s cousin, Edmond, the second son, soon to take orders as a clergyman, has always been her best friend. Fanny is in love with him, and he is kind and solicitous, though he does not regard her as a possible wife.

But the two sisters, Maria and Julia, go to great lengths to compromise their morals in their flirtation with a charming newcomer, Mr. Crawford, who, along with his sister, Miss Crawford, is staying at the vicarage with their half-sister, the vicar’s wife. Mr. Crawford loves flirtatious mayhem.

There is much confusion in the realm of love at Mansfield Park. Maria is engaged to Mr. Rushford, a very rich but stupid young man, but because she plans to marry for money she sees nothing wrong with flirting, or perhaps falling in love, with an eligible bachelor. Fanny is appalled to witness a similar dynamic between Edmond and charming Miss Crawford, whose witty repartee persuades him to compromise his morals. He agrees to act in an amateur play he has said is improper and inappropriate at Mansfield Park. He changes his mind because he is jealous. Ge cannot bear for Miss Crawford to act a love scene with another man.

What a tangled web do the witty Crawfords weave! They are completely louche, as far as Fanny is concerned.

I began to appreciate Fanny’s intelligence during a brief but poignant passage of stream-of-consciousness.  As she muses on her feelings of repulsion toward Henry Crawford, who has decided he is in love with her and makes unwanted advances daily, she is also angry with her uncle, who encourages Henry and thinks it would be a very good thing for him to marry Fanny.

Fanny does not think so, and refuses. Again and again.

Now she was angry. Some resentment did arise at a perseverance so selfish and ungenerous. Here was again a want of delicacy and regard for others which had formerly so struck and disgusted her. Here was again a something of the same Mr. Crawford whom she had so reprobated before.  How evidently was there a gross want of feeling and humanity where his own pleasure was concerned – And, alas! how always known no principle to supply as a duty what the heart was deficient in.  Had her own affections been as free – as perhab they ought to have been – he never could have engaged them.

One feels empathy for Fanny, a woman bullied by two men who do not respect her feelings – because they want her to respect their own.

Mansfield Park is not a comedy. it’s rather like a twenty-first-century women’s saga, Fanny and Miss Crawford both resist marriage to men who love them -though Fanny does not believe Henry Crawford loves her – and Mary Crawford refuses to marry Edmond if he becomes a clergyman, though both are very much in love.

Who suffers the most? There is a happy marriage on the rebound at Mansfield Park, but I wonder about Mary Crawford. Does she feel regret? She was in charge of her life, unlike Fanny, and made her own decision. But surely someone has written an Austen sequel about Mary Crawford!

N.B. In the twenty-first century, there is still great pressure on women like Fanny to marry and have children. I read in the Guardian that Newsweek magazine recently published a male author’s rant, “Taylor Swift Is Not a Good Role Model,” chiding her for being single and not having children.

Jane Austen and Taylor Swift. I rest my case.

The Jane Austen Lifestyle:  Books, Sets, and the Charm of Different Editions

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Illustration of Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, by c. E. Brock (1895)

I am delighted by my summer rereading of Jane Austen, admiring the details in books I had previously considered slight. The advantage to reading them back-to-back is noticing the deepening of her characterization as she hones her style over the years. And I realize that not all of the books are comedies, though all have comic elements.

But for the moment, as a preamble to observations on Jane, let’s chat on a shallow note about the pros and cons of different editions. I am not exactly a collector, no rare 19th-century editions here, but I have at least two different copies of each of my favorite Austen novels. It is a treat I allow myself as a “by-God-yes-I’m-a-bibliophile!”

Austen Sets & Partial Sets

I always begin with Penguin, my favorite publisher of classics. I love the charming designs of the seven-volume Penguin Clothbound Classics set of Austen. The paper is creamy and thick and the books are durable. The pages do not tan as they often do in paperbacks. I do not have a complete set, but certainly appreciate those I have.

The Premier Penguin Clothbound Classics set

I am also a Penguin paperback fan. You can acquire the black-spined Penguin paperbacks of Austen separately and build your own set more cheaply than with hardbacks.

THE PENGUIN ADVANTAGE: attractive book, with scholarly notes, introductions, and appendices in hardcover and paperback.

A Penguin paperback edition of Persuasion

THE WORLD CLOUD CLASSICS SET. I am drawn to the bright covers of these “paperbacks” with vinyl-plastic flexible covers. The prices are reasonable, about $16 each, and you can buy them as a set (the cheapest price I’ve seen is $45). N.B. They look gorgeous, but I have not handled them personally, only seen them in photos. Caveat, emptor!

WORLD CLOUD CLASSICS ADVANTAGE. Design and cheapness.

THE HARPER MUSE JANE AUSTEN SET. This is my favorite Jane Austen set. I love the covers, which feature lacy laser-cut art, and the books are the perfect size, with just the right amount of heft. There are no illustrations but notable quotes are highlighted on pages of their own. What I’m saying is that I like the utilitarian design of the books. Nothing fancy on the pages, just the interaction between the text and the reader.

! THE HARPER MUSE ADVANTAGE: Lovely, unusual covers, no-frill pages, perfect print size.

THE MARJOLIN BASTIN EDITIONS. This series of three of Austen’s novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, features bright floral covers and illustrations of flowers by Marjolin Bastin. She is much admired by vloggers. The drawback: I had expected illustrations of the scenes and characters.

THE MARJOLIN BASTIN ADVANTAGE. Lovely design and illustrations, and these books lie open flat, like an oversized Moleskine notebook.

THE FOLIO SOCIETY COLLECTION. The beautiful Folio Society Austen set can be bought one book at a time, or one can splurge on the complete set. They are expensive, but unwieldy if you read in “the horizontal position. They are expensive, $75 per book, but it is a treat to have such a well-made edition.

The illustrations are gorgeous, often with a modern Gothic look, and I have enjoyed the introductions by novelists. Sebastian Faulkes explains his unique take on Darcy in his introduction to Pride and Prejudice: he comes right out and says how cruel Darcy is to Elizabeth. Fans don’t necessarily want to hear this, but Darcy is indeed more than aloof in the beginning.

Folio Society set of Jane Austen

THE FOLIO ADVANTAGE. The beautiful design and illustrations.

Do you have any favorite editions of Austen? There are so many.

Notes on Self-Checkout: Chocolate & Coffee

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 It’s 8 a.m.  I won’t lie:  I seldom get up this early. If I’m up at 8:00, I’m reading science fiction or Jane Austen (there are similarities) while the coffee brews.  Only today it won’t brew:  the machine keeps flashing the CLEAN sign, and  I can’t face the odor of the vinegar rinse.

I’ll do it tomorrow.

I head to the coffee house.

8:15:  It is a long, long line. Some people are jovial, chirping about their plans for the Fourth of July.  I stand in line reading a review of the new Planet of the Apes movie.  Finally I order my epic coffee and find a chair outside. I read an editorial on the presidential debate, which I did not see and which journalists are taking too seriously (because how many people watched it?), when a guy looks at my purse and says, “Military issue, right?”

Gosh, should I be flattered or spooked? I am filled with gloom. “I bought it at Target,” I say.  I’m wearing scrubs (a gift from a doctor’s wife) so hoped I’d be mistaken for a doctor, but, no, my bag gives me a MILITARY look.

After the trauma of hearing “military issue” applied to my purse, I feel a need for decadent chocolate.  If I breakfast on chocolate, ALL WILL BE WELL. I rush to the drugstore, seeking solace in the cookie aisle. It’s not a controlled substance, but it is known as “junk” food, so I prefer to buy it at the self checkout.

Unfortunately the self-checkout lane is closed.

Well, it’s better to interact with people anyway. The cashiers will lose their jobs if everyone prefers self-checkout.  As I stand in line and see what others are buying, I don’t feel bad about the chocolate at all. It’s practically health food. It’s holiday food.

Happy Fourth of July!

Price Tags in “Pride and Prejudice”

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Pride and Prejudice is a comedy about love, or an existential comedy about the incongruity of love. Elizabeth Bennet’s friend, Charlotte Lucas,28, marries a ridiculous vicar she does not esteem because she has no suitors and wants a home of her own. Twenty-year-old Elizabeth, the spirited, witty heroine, is not seduced by money or status. She nobly declines to be charmed by Mr. Darcy after he is rude to her at a ball.  Darcy is impossibly handsome, impossibly rich, and impossibly snobbish.  He concedes that Elizabeth has fine eyes and that her older sister Jane is pretty but despises their mother, the ineffably silly Mrs. Bennet.  

Elizabeth may resist the love of lucre, but everything comes with a price tag in Pride and Prejudice. Every income and/or estate is analyzed down to the last penny. Mrs. Bennet is joyous when Mr. Bingley, a well-to-do young man, rents Netherfield and brings a small party, among them his best friend Darcy and his own two sisters. Mrs. Bennet hopes fantastically to marry off one of her daughters to Bingley.

Soon the whole town is buzzing about the money. 

We learn:

“Mr. Bingley inherited money to the amount of nearly a hundred thousand pounds.”

His two unpleasant sisters “had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, were in the habit of spending more than they ought, and associating with people of rank.”

And then there is Darcy, the hero of this love story.  Everyone at the ball is impressed “with Darcy’s fine, tall person, handsome features noble mien, and the report which was in circulation within five minutes of his entrance of him having ten thousand a year.”

He alienates the people of Meryton by refusing to dance with the local girls.  After all, money can go only so far in gaining esteem.  Elizabeth continues to hate him, even after he changes his mind about her and begins to make overtures of love.

During this fourth or fifth reading, I questioned whether Darcy is “Pride” and Elizabeth “Prejudice.”  Darcy and Lizzie both seem to me to personify both qualities. Who is proudest, who is most prejudiced? Lizzie is pert and abrupt with Darcy, misunderstanding his character on the word of an attractive soldier who spreads vile rumors about him.  And when Darcy proposes to Lizzie, he is so rude that he actually say he has tried to defeat his love for her because of her deplorable mother and family connections.. Who would not say “No” to that? Darcy’s social skills are terrible!

But Darcy comes to the rescue when the youngest and silliest Bennet sister, Lydia, elopes with a libertine. Only later does Lizzie learn that Darcy negotiated with and paid the man to marry Lydia after he had tracked them down.

And then, ZOWIE! Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle vacation in Derbyshire and decide to tour Pemberley, Darcy’s estate. Elizabeth can’t help but think she could have been the mistress of this great house.  And when they run into Darcy, let us just say there is chemistry between Darcy and Elizabeth.

There is more comedy to come, because everyone is confused about Elizabeth’s relationship with Darcy. No one, not even her older sister Jane, believes Elizabeth should marry Darcy.  Mr. Bennet strongly advises her to think again.  He believes she is marrying for money.  “My dear Lizzie, I would- I do congratulate you – but are you certain?  Forgive the question – are you quite certain that you could be happy with him?”

And “Are  you out of your mind to be accepting this man?  Have you not always  hated him?”

All this is hilarious, of course, though it raises certain issues: penniless Elizabeth and rich Darcy are in love, but Darcy has paid for her esteem by helping Lydia.  Yet it is a completely satisfying ending of a marriage plot. Austen wickedly leaves us with a few questions, but this is a gentle comedy.