Mr. Darcys Dream by Elizabeth Aston

Aston’s Austen is a generation after Pride & Prejudice *** 3 Stars

By Gabrielle Pantera

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 3/6/2009 – “I was feeling a bit uncertain about my whole writing career,” says Mr. Darcy’s Dream author Elizabeth Aston. “”Mr. Darcy’s Daughters, the first book in the series, was going to be published in England. My agent had said there was no point in trying to find a publisher in America, as it wasn’t right for the market there.”

Publisher’s Lunch is the publishing industry’s newsletter on what is happening in the publishing industry. “Publisher’s Lunch had just started up,” says Aston. “I went ahead and posted a blurb. That was on a Sunday evening. The next day, Monday afternoon for me, the phone began to ring. Five publishers asked for the full script. Nicole Diamond, then at Touchstone, a huge Jane Austen fan, bought the book.”

Mr. Darcy’s dream, a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, follows the next generation of the Darcy and Bingley families. Phoebe, a niece of Mr. Darcy, is told she can’t marry the man of her dreams and retreats to Pemberley. Joining her is Louisa Bingley, who’s glad to give up a fourth season in London. Both girls are pleased that an absentee Mr. and Mrs. Darcy entrust them with the preparations for ball for four hundred people. There are possibilities for love for both girls. Will they find true love?

Aston met someone by chance who knew all about growing pineapples in glasshouses, which inspired her to set the story of Mr. Darcy’s Dream in the context of renovations to the gardens at Pemberley. “I thought about Pemberley, how tastes in the style of gardens and landscape at that time around 1820 were changing. The Industrial Revolution and the production of wrought iron were making new structures possible. Particular research for this book was to do with gardens and glass houses…and how pineapples were grown in Derbyshire!”

With the garden as the backdrop, Aston wanted to explore what marriage meant to women from that class in that period. “I’ve become very interested in the status and attitudes of women in early nineteenth-century England,” says Aston. “The research goes back over years of reading the literature and history of the period.”

Mr. Darcy’s Dream is the sixth book in this series. “My next book, Writing Jane Austen is different,” says Aston. :It’s contemporary, and about a young American writer’s trials and tribulations when a hitherto unknown first chapter of a new novel by Jane Austen is discovered in a publisher’s cupboard, and she’s commissioned to complete the book.” Aston’s next book scheduled to be published in 2010.

Mr. Darcy’s Dream has well crafted characters, and the story is well written.Worth the read. You won’t have to read the other books in the series to understand it. However, if you’re looking for the original Pride and Prejudice characters, they’re few and far between.

Elizabeth Aston was born in Santiago, Chile and currently lives in Malta. Aston has written twenty books.

Mr. Darcy’s Dream by Elizabeth Aston
Trade Paperback, 304 pages, $15.00
Publisher: Touchstone
Release Date: February 3, 2009
ISBN 9781416547266