A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Bibliographic info: A Woman of Influence by Rebecca Ann Collins, Pride & Prejudice sequel series, Book 9, Sourcebooks Landmark, Pub. Date: June 1, 2010, ISBN: 978-1-4022-2451-5, 336 pages, List: $14.99. (Amazon: $10.19 / Kindle $9.99)

I came late to this series, so I first met Rebecca “Becky” Tate in Recollection of Rosings where she seemed a bit like one of those women who, at loose ends, trys to take charge of the lives of those around her. Becky, throughout that book, tried to impress upon her sister Catherine that her daughter was making the wrong match. Over the course of the novel, Becky began, as she became closer to her sister and reacquainted herself with Huntsford and the surrounding area, to realize that her London friends were not really friends at all. She began to question her values and just what she wanted to do with her life. Most of this story was in the background because Recollection of Rosings is Catherine’s story.

In A Woman of Influence, Becky Tate is the main character. She’s sold her London house and moved to Huntsford to the house that she fell in love with…Edgewater. She’s within walking distance of the small church that her father, Mr. Collins, preached at when she was a child, and to the home of her sister, Catherine, and also the school that she helped Catherine establish for children in the area. She’s changed her life and she’s content but feels restless and is often overwhelmed with grief when she thinks of the death of her daughter, Josie, and the estrangement that caused with the Darcys.

It is little wonder that Becky becomes embroiled in the life of a young woman and her child. The child was caught looking into the windows of Edgewater and he refused to say what he was doing there. The mother rushed up in time to explain that the child didn’t talk since his father was arrested. Becky thought the young woman was well-spoken and, concerned for the woman and her child found living rough,  she employs the girl in her home. The girl’s story causes Becky to take an interest and she begins to unravel the threads of the story and to look into the facts. This task becomes difficult as Becky must find a solution that will bring the family together while managing to not let anyone involved know that she is looking into the legalities of the original arrest and testimony.

Becky’s quest to help this young girl is the thread that keeps you reading as she follows the clues and gathers information. There is a secondary love story as Becky once again meets a gentleman who had helped her through the worst of her grief after her daughter’s death. As they renew their acquaintance, they find that they pick up their friendship as if only a day had past rather than years. Will it deepen to true love? For that you’ll need to read the book.

Once again, Collins uses straight narrative from Becky’s point of view, mixed with letters, diary entries, and other material to lead us through the story and to fill us in on necessary information without having to resort to long information dumps. Though one could say the letters and the diary entries are just that — info dumps — they don’t feel like it to the reader because they fit so nicely into the setting of the story.

Rebecca Ann Collins’ writing is well paced but slower than many readers might be used to.  However, it has much the same tone and pacing of the original Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice, which was the precursor to the series. Collins continues the characters of Pride and Prejudice, taking them forward in time and allowing them to change and grow with the changing times. The Appendix lists the main characters in the book and their relationships to each other. The main characters of Pride and Prejudice now have grandchildren and the world is changing around them.

Becky Tate was a women of her times with dreams and ambition that would be difficult to achieve for a woman. She married to achieve some of those goals. However, that marriage was a partnership rather than a love match and while she had much influence and did a lot of good with her charity work, she was dependent on her husband. In A Woman of Influence, you’ll see how much the world has changed and women have moved forward and gained some ability to steer their own course through life, but they are still not as free as women are today to be able to choose the life they wish to lead. It’s important to remember that Collins didn’t make up the rules that women in this period must live by, she’s only reflecting the historical period in which these books take place.

So, visit the world of the 1860s, take the time to slowing sink into the narrative and, for a while, enjoy a time when people took the time to talk to each other without a cell-phone or ipod in sight. Life was lived, at least on the economic level of our main characters, at a more leisurely pace. Curl up with this book and a cup of tea and enjoy.

Recollections of Rosings by Rebecca Ann Collins is book 8 of The Pemberley Chronicles. (Published by Sourcebooks, ISBN: 978-1-4022-2450-8, 336 pages, $14.99 US/$17.99 CAN/£7.99 UK)

While this is book 8, I found it fairly easy to get into. This is only the second book in the series that I’ve read. I reviewed Postscripts from Pemberly back in December 2009. If you’ve read Pride and Prejudice, you’ve got an understanding of the major characters.  And while these characters have moved on, had children, had their children marry, lost loved ones — reading Collins’ work is like dropping in on a huge family reunion after being out of touch for a long while. The books, or at least the ones that I’ve read have an Appendix that lists the major characters and the relationships between them.

I’m starting by pointing this out because there’s a relaxed atmosphere about the stores in Postscripts… and now Recollections…. Collins has a way of presenting the stories partly through the type of narrative/interactive story you’d expect, but she also uses journal or diary entries and letters to help us get a deeper understanding of the characters that have a major part to play. This makes reading the books a lot like being asked to read someone’s personal journal when you know all the people involved (society pages without the cattiness).

Recollections of Rosings is, as you’ve probably guessed about Rosings, the major residence of Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Lady Catherine has been gone for sometime and the estate is run by a board of trustees on which Fitzwilliam Darcy serves. The story opens with the terrible news that there has been a fire at Rosings that has caused considerable damage. The current Vicar, Mr. Harrison, suffers a heart attack and his continuing illness causes some drastic changes to his situation for himself and his family. His wife Catherine, one of Charlotte and Mr. Collins’ daughters, is now caring for her husband and dealing with her grief over the damage done to Rosings where she lived when Lady Catherine took her in as a young child to be a companion for Anne.

The Rosings estate has recently hired a curator to deal with the historic artwork and others treasures of Rosings. Luckily he had done much of the work to catalog what was in the house and it will be useful to the board in determining their loss and what can and should be done to rebuild. That he is also someone who had worked at Rosings while Catherine lived with Lady Catherine helps to bring back many memories and releasing many emotions of her childhood and early adulthood before her marriage.

Meanwhile, Catherine’s daughter seems to be falling in love with a young man in the neighborhood that few people know anything about other than he’s a gentleman and very good at his job. Beck Tate, Catherine’s sister, is at loose ends as her husband has gone to America on business, leaving her behind. Unfortunately for Catherine, Becky feels it is her duty to watch out for her supposedly more naive and unsophisticated sister.

That sets out the parameters of the book, but the journey and the experience of reading it yourself is the frosting on the cake. Collins is not flamboyant — the writing is very reminiscent of sitting about with a best friend talking about family, friends, what is happening with the neighbors, what’s going on, what can be done to make life better for those around you — and yourself, of course.

That’s not to say that you won’t shed tears, laugh out loud, try to get characters to look before they leap, get angry about how some are treated, wonder why other won’t mind their own business, and smile because sometimes love does conquer all. And best of all, for some people there are second chances and, while they don’t come often, when they happen you should not stand and watch them pass you by but reach out for new dreams and a new life.

There’s a very comfortable feel to The Pemberly Chronicles. These are people most of us have spent a lot of time with. Austen created characters that still resonant with us so many years after she wrote her books. That Austen often left her characters just as the leave they church after their wedding, it’s no wonder that so many of us want to know what happened next. Rebecca Ann Collins gives us one possible future — it’s a comfortable one that we can relate too that differs only in degree from the future we see around us for our friends and family.

These are wonderful books for a rainy day — or any day — when you want to believe that people are good at heart and that families stand together in times of trouble. These are books that continue the story of some well loved characters but they are also books of hope and of dreams of communities that many of us would like to live in.

Postscript from Pemberly is book seven of the Pemberley Chronicles. Unfortunately, I haven’t read any of the previous six books. Well, that’s not entirely true. I did read the “look inside” of the first book a while back and put it on my wish list on Amazon; but with the height of my TBR pile…. But, when I got the chance to read Postscript from Pemberley, I wasn’t going to be stopped by the lack of prior book knowledge (and you shouldn’t either). The book, you see, has an appendix that lists the major characters and their family relationships. As you can probably imagine by the seventh book, we’re into cousin and grandchildren territory.

The main point of view character is Jessica Courtney. Jessica is the daughter of Rev. James Courtney and Emily Gardiner Courtney (the daughter of the Gardiners — Elizabeth’s and Jane’s Aunt and Uncle Gardiner). Jessica’s parents run the church and parish at Kympton. When the book opens we learn that Julian Darcy, the oldest son of Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy, is having problems. His wife, Josie, has left him and their son to run off with a man who has promised to publish her book. We later learn that the book never got published, Josie got left on her own, and is very ill. Josie doesn’t recover and dies. Julian returns home to leave his son with his sister and her husband before going to France to continue his research.

All this is in the first few pages but it sets up the relationship that develops between Jessica and Julian as they become friends. Whether this relationship will develop into anything more is anyone’s guess as Julian is much older (Jessica is eighteen). Besides, Julian is headed to Paris for more study and Jessica is offered the chance to run the expanded and upgraded school on the grounds of Pemberley.

Mr. Darcy, ever concerned for the people that look to him for their livelihood, has decided that the current school at the church and at Pemberley is not educating the children for anything other than menial jobs and he wants to do better. Jessica is hired (and moves into Pemberley) to run the school and hire two additional teachers to develop a course of study that will better prepare the area’s children.

Thus we have at least two plot lines going. Actually there are several other plot threads in this volume. Will Jessica and Julian fall in love? Will they remain friends? Will the school work out? Will Jessica find qualified teachers? Will bringing two people in who have not been part of the previous books cause problems? What other family squabbles and events will occur to stir up the family.

What’s a novel without some conflict? Not very interesting, actually. Luckily for us, Rebecca Ann Collins knows that we need to have some conflict and some ambiguity in our reading and she provides it. Told mostly from Jessica’s point of view, we learn about the ups and downs of the now fairly large cast of characters. Jessica being the kindhearted person she is tends to be the one that her cousins turn to when they need advice or just to talk candidly without rumors spreading. Jessica listens, seldom judges, and knows how to keep secrets — especially her own. One interesting choice is that some of Jessica’s interior thoughts are told from snippets from her journal and from letters written to her and from her to others.

When a young lady with impeccable teaching credentials returns to live with her parents, Jessica finds not only an exceptional teacher for the school but a friend. However, Jessica is not the only person with secrets. Remember too that while we’ve reached 1866 — the times are not our own and in many ways the rules of behavior in that period of time make it difficult to understand the utter devastation that can be done to someone’s reputation for behavior that in our time wouldn’t even lift an eyebrow. Women were kept to a strict standard that most of us would rebel against with all our might today.

Postscript from Pemberley is fine addition to the growing list of Pride and Prejudice sequels. A marvelous book to curl up with on a rainy day with a hot cup of tea, to sink into a time and place so different from our own and visit people who seem so familiar. There’s no explosions or car chases, but there is tension and conflict and people we care about and hope will turn out happy at the end. It’s a book that when you finish you give a sigh of satisfaction and perhaps turn back to page one and start over.