The Darcys and the Bingleys by Marsha Altman

Altman’s sequel to Pride & Prejudice
offers fresh banter – 3 stars ***

by Gabrielle Pantera

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 11/21/2008 – “Really I just wanted to write some Darcy-Bingley banter, something I hadn’t read enough of in other sequels or fan-fic,” says The Darcys & the Bingleys author Marsha Altman. “The first section, ‘A Bit of Advice’, started as a short story.”
The Darcys & the Bingleys starts three days before the wedding in Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice and goes thought the birth of Darys and Bingleys children.

You’ll laugh out loud many times while reading The Darcys & the Bingleys. Altman knows how to keep the plot moving. She knows how to phrase a sentence. There are times when the author is absolutely brilliant in her writing, but not consistently.

“I suppose my two goals are to make the characters funny, and to make the readers sympathize with Caroline Bingley, which is pretty surprising to do if I pulled it off,” says Altman. “Also, there’s a fight scene. Well, two.”

“Slowly I started branching out to deal with the other characters and found them just as fun to play with,” says Altman. “My basic principle for the start was to give some decency to every character, even if they essentially remained as they were presented in Pride and Prejudice.”

“Mr. Collins is still silly but his wife loves him,” says Altman. “Mr. Bennet passed out when his daughter was born and his wife mocks him for it. Lydia realizes that Wickham’s presence is not appropriate at the wedding of her sisters.”

“Any character can be made sympathetic when put into an amusing situation,” says Altman. “I reserved the real villains for my second story, in the latter part of The Darcys and the Bingleys. Those characters were invented, given motives, and then dispatched. By then I had realized there was more I could do in the story.”

“There are nine more stories after this book that I hope will be published,” says Altman. “Then I can finally move on, probably back to the cyberpunk and urban fantasy that I usually write and have been writing all my life. Sci-fi is a much harder field to break into than historical romance, in terms of the world of publishing. I have things on the shelf that need revision, and some ideas for new projects, but it’s hard to move from Regency fiction to metaphysical noir. There’s a mental shift there that takes a few days.”

Altman makes a few glaring errors jarring to anyone who reads stories set in Regency England. Women didn’t travel alone, especially women of means. And, a woman would not have ridden astride from Scotland to London by themselves. Aside from those missteps you’ll thoroughly enjoyed the book.
Marsha Altman is originally from North Caldwell , New Jersey, the same town The Sopranos is set in. She currently lives in New York

The Darcys & the Bingleys: A Tale of Two Gentlemen’s Marriages to Two Most Devoted Sisters by Marsha Altman
Trade Paperback
Sourcebooks Landmark
Release: September 1, 2008
432 pages
ISBN: 9781402213489