Review: The Three Colonels: Jane Austen’s Fighting Men by Jack Caldwell

Posted in Review on May 3rd, 2012

Cover of The Three Colonels: Jane Austen's Fighting Men. Sourcebooks Landmark (March 1, 2012) ISBN: 978-1402259739. Trade Paperback. $14.99 (Amazon: $11.18 / Kindle: $9.99).

Jack Caldwell gives the men of Austen’s world a chance to shine. Napoleon is planning his escape from Elba. And we all know what that means — Waterloo is almost inevitable to be part of the story; after all there are three colonels in this story. Colonel Christopher Brandon of Sense and Sensibility, Colonel Richard Fitzwilliam of Pride and Prejudice, and Colonel John Buford for this story. With Napoleon’s escape they are all called upon to serve their country again.

This is a follow on story. Marianne and Christopher Brandon are now happily married with a daughter named Joy. The Darcy’s are also very happy in their marriage and have a son, Bennet. Many of the people from Sense and Sensibilities and Pride and Prejudice show up. All the Bennet daughters are married now. Carolyn Bingley is engaged to Colonel Buford when the story begins. Lady Catherine and her daughter, Anne, are also included.

Through flashbacks, Caldwell explains how Caroline has changed since loosing Darcy to Elizabeth. It also sets up how Colonel Buford fits into the scheme of things. There are multiple threads in this novel, one thread follows Anne de Bourgh’s transition from sickly daughter to a force to be reckoned with. A second thread follows Caroline Bingley’s rebuilding of her life after Pride and Prejudice. A third show the changes in the relationship between Colonel Brandon and Marianne with a few surprises. Next is a thread that follows up on Denny and Wickham. And, we must not forget the biggest plot line of all — the escape of Napoleon and the historical events that led to Waterloo, the battle, and the aftermath.

If you love the world and characters of Jane Austen’s creation but do not enjoy the nitty-gritty history of her time, give The Three Colonels a try. Caldwell, while he does cover the battle of Waterloo and the events leading up to it, brings it closer to home by covering it through the eyes and feelings of the characters that we’ve come to know well through books. Austen wrote of the daily life of the kind of people she knew and observed. Caldwell pulls the men of her fiction into the historical events of her lifetime. While the people of England were separated by the channel from the fighting, it still impacted them, especially if they had loved ones in the service.

We like to think of wars as being something that doesn’t effect us. We’re safe, and those stories in the news don’t effect us. But many of us, as in Austen’s time, have husbands, fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, and relatives who have or are in wars being fought in faraway lands. Jack Caldwell uses the lives of characters we’re familiar with and care about to show that while times have changed and the technology may have changed, the destruction of war effects us all.

Read the The Three Colonels for the joy of seeing what’s happened in the lives of the characters we know through Austen’s works. Read it for the chance to see dry history, spread out before us, as history effects and impacts the people of the time. Or, simple read The Three Colonels for telling a darn good story and making Caroline Bingley a woman most of us would actually be glad to know.