Review: The Legacy of Pemberley by Rebecca Ann Collins
The Legacy of Pemberley by Rebecca Ann Collins. Book 10 of The Pemberley Chronicles. Sourcebooks Landmark. Trade Paperback. ISBN: 978-1-4022-2452-2. 352 pages. List $14.99 (Amazon: $10.19 / Kindle: $9.68)
Collins reports that this 10th book will be the last in The Pemberley Chronicles. She’s taken the characters through 50 years of marriage. Darcy and Elizabeth are parents and grandparents. The extended family has grown as their children and the Bingley children and Collins children married. With three generations there is now an amazingly large cast of characters to follow. In The Legacy of Pemberley, Collins finishes up a few dangling plot threads and smooths out the wrinkles to allow her characters to continue to grow and change in the minds of her readers.
Emily Courtney has been ailing and decides to present her will to her family while she’s still living so they can ask questions and be sure that it is her wish to leave things the way she plans. The loss of Emily will ripple through the thoughts of everyone in the Pemberley Chronicles. Jude, Emily’s youngest son, finally gets a part in the books as he falls in love and is accepted. The mystery of William Courtney’s seeming indifference to his mother is cleared up — though some may still not be willing to forgive him. Charles Bingley’s health is still compromised and Jane, while keeping a calm facade is fearful of losing him. The public education bill is not what so many of the family have pushed for, or what Mr. Gladstone promised when he was elected, and we share in the disappointment of many of the Pemberley extended family.
With so many plot threads, you’d think the book would be rushed but as usual, it’s told through letters, diary entries, conversations, and by the narrator. All of the Pemberley Chronicle books have an elegance to them — the language and the pacing hark back to a time when there was time to enjoy reading, writing, visiting with friends. In many ways, these are books to curl up with and put the present day world out of your mind as you enjoy a visit to landed gentry in time gone by. Collins manages to give the story the tone and feel of Austen — where the story is simple lives lived well and all the emotional content comes from the reader.
While The Legacy of Pemberley may be the last in the series, it does allow the reader to believe that all is well with the families we’ve followed over ten novels and through marriage, courtship, loss, and joy. Also, if many of you treat these books as I do and reread them over and over for comfort when the world becomes too chaotic to deal with or illness makes you want to escape — read through them again without the necessity of a long wait between books.
If you’ve read previous books in the series, you’ll enjoy The Legacy of Pemberley. If you haven’t read any of the the previous books, you should probably start with the first one to greet each of the new characters as the appear and give them a chance to become acquainted.