Review: The Darcy Connection by Elizabeth Aston
I’m evidently still in a Austen mood. Prior to vacation, I finished reading The Darcy Connection by Elizabeth Aston. This one, I can give my whole-hearted endorsement. Aston definitely has a feel for the original characters and brings that into her follow-on stories even when the original characters are only on the pages for short periods.
In The Darcy Connection, the daughters of Mr. Collins and Charlotte are of marriageable age. Jane the eldest is a beautiful girl with many of the same qualities as her mother except that she is so reserved no one ever knows what she thinks or feels. Eliza, named after Elizabeth Bennet Darcy who is her godmother, is much as Elizabeth was in her youth but not as tempered by her common sense.
Mr. Collins is now the Bishop of Ripon due mostly to the clever manipulations of him by Charlotte. He is as insufferably full of himself as ever. The Collins’s also have a son but he only shows up for a few paragraphs and is, I’m afraid to say, his father’s son in temperment and mental acuteness. Sadly, it’s the girls that take after their mother. I say sadly, because women didn’t have many options in those days except to manipulate those around them to achieve their goals.
Jane is to be taken to London to have a season by a relation of Charlotte’s, Lady Grandpoint. Eliza was not to go until it’s found that she and the son of the local Squire are a bit too fond of each other. Eliza believes she is in love. So, naturally the cure it to remove Eliza to London with Jane and for the young man to learn to run his father’s estate. It’s clear from the start that Eliza is to be included only in events that take place at the Grandpoint’s home. She will not have a season. She will only be included when it would be impolitic not to have her at a social event outside the Grandpoint home. This is fine with Eliza as she is happy for Jane to take center stage.
The relationship between Jane and Eliza is not as close as that between Jane and Elizabeth Bennet or between the Darcy girls in Mr. Darcy’s Daughters. The connection of the title seems to be to the Darcy daughters as Eliza visits the household of Mrs. Camilla Darcy Wytton. It’s here that Eliza meets a number of people and through them begin to be invited out. Eliza turns out to be a young lady of surprising resources and accomplishments some of which are not in keeping with being a bishop’s daughter.
The interplay between what is happening with Jane and her season and Eliza and her non-season, plays wonderfully well as the plot threads weave around each other. Eliza may be the sister that is usually in trouble but Jane with her reserve often made this reader think of the phrase “still waters run deep.” As the story unfolds and the characters come alive with their actions and reactions to each other and changing situations and scenes, we suspect that more is going on behind the scenes than we know. In other words, the reader gets hooked into the story quite quickly and then it’s straight on ’til morning or the end of the book.
The story runs along allowing us to enjoy Eliza and her wit, charm, and observations of everyone and everything she meets and interacts with. There is comedy, drama, pathos, and sparkling conversations, several dastardly men (definitely not gentlemen in spite of their societal level and without mustaches but nevertheless not nice, if not down-right evil), and some interesting twist and turns.
Still the ending is as it should be, and as it usually is with an Austen-like novel, satisfying. So, you end the book with a sigh of completion and satisfaction of a story well told and some lives well settled.