DARCY

McVeigh’s retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice focuses on Darcy’s perspective.

For the most part, the author’s retelling of Austen’s classic tale is precisely that—the basic elements of the story remain the same, in an homage too loving to allow much revision. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. FitzwilliamDarcy make their acquaintance in acrimony—he offends her with his aloof social clumsiness, which is misread as acerbic pride. She is courted by the predatory George Wickham, a charming but amoral and cunning man who also attempts to take advantage of Darcy’s naive sister, Georgiana. Meanwhile, Darcy’s closest friend, Mr. Charles Bingley, courts Elizabeth’s sister, Jane; she’s the beauty of the family, but so impassively unassuming that Darcy wrongly assumes she’s not really all that romantically interested and intrusively prepares to thwart their courtship. The major addition to the plot from McVeigh is a potential scandal involving Darcy—in Rome, he falls in love with an Italian singer, Giuditta Negri, a beautiful but temperamental woman who accuses him of making romantic commitments and then skipping town, a development that threatens to sully his family’s name. The author masterfully captures not only Darcy’s strange combination of decency, aristocratic stuffiness, and rhetorical bluntness, but also the lightsome elegance of Austen’s style: “It was all madness, of course. I could not imagine what people would say. An Italian noblewoman might be acceptable, but Giuditta was equally undistinguished by birth or fortune. If one inclined towards the brutal, she was a beauty with a voice.”

By including excerpts from Darcy’s diaries, the author aims to more sensitively plumb his innermost thoughts, an aim she admirably achieves. The reader sees, in sharp relief, the tension within Darcy between his moral rectitude and sense of honor and his clumsy truculence. Also, McVeigh has a remarkable sense of the literary world Austen established, and she is able to recreate parts of it with masterly skill. More specifically, she reproduces Austen’s prose style with great fidelity, in all of its charming sophistication and clever wit. However, this virtuosic imitation is only that—for the most part, this retelling is the same story, written in the same style, but any devoted fan of Austen will detect the distance between original and counterfeit. Why not simply reread the peerless original, then? One could imagine an admirer of Austen, who has read Pride and Prejudice countless times, pining for a whole new story—maybe a glimpse of Darcy’s life set before the action of the novel, or of his time with Elizabeth after the book is over. Instead, McVeigh largely retells the same story, and, for all of its pleasures, this novel is nowhere near as mesmerizing as the one that inspired it. The author’s obvious reverence for Austen actually appears to stymie her creativity—she seems insufficiently bold to stray too far from Austen’s original vision and inadvertently disrespect the novel by staking out new ground. One can’t help but credit McVeigh’s powers of imitation, and to share her enthusiasm for a marvelous work of literature. Nonetheless, a true Austen devotee is more likely to be bored by this reproduction than excited by the attempt at reimagining.

An admirable exercise in literary mimicry, but unlikely to excite genuine fans of Austen.