Kitty and Mary

This is not the first novel to take up the characters of Pride and Prejudice and create new lives for them, but it’s the first that I know to be written for a young adult audience. The blessing for an author is that there is much to work with. Even Austen’s relatively minor figures are so clearly drawn that the world of any new novel comes ready peopled. The challenge, without doing an injustice to Austen or her social world, is to take her characters somewhere else, perhaps even to a place that Austen herself would never think of going. Julia Gray and Imogen Russell Williams make the most of the opportunities and adroitly avoid the possible pitfalls. The stories of the younger Bennet sisters, Kitty and Mary, are told through their letters and journals after the events of Austen’s novel. I assume from the cover of my proof copy that Julia Gray is writing Kitty’s story and Imogen Russell Williams, Mary’s; providing each sister with her own voice. Both voices are recognisably Austenian, and what is revealed in the gap between letters and journals offers some sharp insights and sly humour that fans of the original creator should recognise. Love and marriage remain a preoccupation for Kitty and Mary as it was for their sisters, alongside a determination to shape their own identities, a more modern preoccupation which, if anything, is only implicit in Austen’s novels. And the two sisters go in different directions. Kitty remains at home in the familiar Austen social world, intent on becoming more conventionally feminine and accomplished to catch the attention of the new tenant of Netherfield Hall, while Mary becomes the companion of a young woman who is on her way to make a new life in India. For myself, Mary’s journey, which includes a long sea voyage and the possibilities which are opened up by the people she meets in India, is the more interesting of the two. But a great deal of the humour is on Kitty’s side as she tries on a variety of unsuitable personas, eventually to find one that fits perfectly and naturally, courtesy of an unexpected suitor. Young people who know Austen, either through the books themselves, or through the many screen adaptations, will know what to expect and will not be disappointed. They will also find aspects of Regency life that did not find their way into Jane’s stories. For other readers, who knows, it might be an introduction to the great works themselves.