Review: The Plight of the Darcy Brothers: A Tale of The Darcys and the Bingleys by Marsha Altman
The Plight of the Darcy Brothers begins several months after the ending of The Darcys & the Bingleys. Elizabeth has miscarried. She and Darcy are devastated but they have their son, Geoffrey, who is very much like his father, and they are assured that there will be more children.
Starting with such sadness, you’d expect this book to be much darker than its predecessor, but there is hope. Jane and Bingley live nearby and the visits are frequent. Elizabeth begins to come out of her depression. Even Mrs. Bennet surprises us with her common sense advice — who knew she had it in her.
Then a mysterious letter comes from Mary Bennet who has been studying in Paris, asking Jane to come to her in Brighton. It’s mysterious because it’s not like Mary to be so uninformative and secretive. Jane, of course, asks Elizabeth to come with her. When they arrive at the Fitzwilliams’ home, Mary isn’t there. They don’t know where she is staying or how to find her. But then Mary shows up and breaks her bad news. Jane and Elizabeth, while shocked to their core, immediately offer Mary all the assistance they can and the trio sets off for Chatton, Jane’s home.
The entire family gets involved and begins to come up with a plan to save Mary’s reputation. Someone must take charge and we all know that someone will be Darcy. He’d been looking for a way to help Elizabeth get over the loss of her child and the journey they must take would be the perfect opportunity. Also, it seems from Mrs. Reynolds that there is also some unfinished business of his father’s in France. Hopefully, they can handle it and Mary’s problem at the same time.
While The Darcys & the Bingleys, took us from the marriage at the end of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to the two couples settling down and adapting to married life, The Plight of the Darcy Brothers moves us into unknown territory. Many sequels to Pride and Prejudice move us beyond the wedding, Altman manages to do so by adding additional characters and by allowing the characters to grow and change in accordance with the events that have happened to them since the wedding. Yet, she is still working with the characters that we have grown to love — she doesn’t deviate from the integrity and moral values that Austen imbued them with in her work. However, they’ve moved on–grown. Kitty and Georgiana have become friends with the result that Kitty is more calm and responsible and Georgiana is less shy. Caroline Bingley has found happiness with Dr. Maddox and lives in London.
This story, while about Mary, has Mary only as the driving force of the plot and mostly off the page. It’s Darcy and Elizabeth that take center stage. They are trying to save Mary’s reputation and, by extension, Kitty’s. They make some new friends and find some unexpected allies and family along the way.
Altman manages to move between the story lines — Darcy and Elizabeth in Europe and Bingley and Jane and the rest of the Bennets in Chatton, and Caroline and Dr. Maddox in London — deftly. As with the first book there is humor, always apt, sometimes silly but always fitting to the occasion and circumstances and, if we’re honest, resonating with our own lives. There are also some moments of extreme poignancy that actually brought tears to my eyes (even on rereading the book a second and then a third time).
Altman manages to stay true to the original characters, tell a whopping good story, make us laugh and cry in all the right places, and make us want to read it again and again. It’s that ability that makes her follow-ons to Pride and Prejudice, ones that we will impatiently await like the coming of a new season.