Well it is Sunday afternoon and I am still feeling a trifle post-virus and lethargic and not back in my routine, but I must get on with it and start back on Random otherwise I feel I will never post again. This virus has just knocked me sideways and I have been told it will be a ‘few weeks’ before I am totally well. Encouraging words.
Never mind. Here I am and have spent any reading time I have had over the last week, perusing non-heavyweight intellectual books as my brain is still fuzzy at the edges and I do not have the gumption at the moment for honing my reviewing finger. So I am writing about a book I came across in Waterstones the other week: Old Friends and New Fancies by one Sybil G Brinton. Who she? Exactly. Nobody seems to know and the link I have attached here is fairly scathing about this book, which is billed as ‘The First Jane Austen Sequel ever created’. Apparently, it was written in 1913 and was reprinted in 2007, but I had read nothing about it and stumbled across it be sheer accident.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article2358163.ece
I think this reviewer is a bit harsh and humourless about it all as it is obviously written for sheer fun. I found it to be totally unpretentious, without any of the high flown pastiche that a lot of Austen sequelisers (made that word up) go in for, bar one or two I have enjoyed. It is all a bit silly and yet, also, intriguing. All of Austen’s characters lived at the same time, were involved in the navy, law and church and so it was 
likely that they would meet up with each other as they moved in the same circles.
Sybil G Brinton has worked on this premise and so we have Mr and Mrs Darcy with a new curate at the living at Pemberley. He is James Morland, brother of Catherine (now Mrs Tilney), who falls in love with Kitty Bennett. However, Kitty who is in many ways similar to her sister Lydia (now in the West Indies with Wickham), rejects him as she has fallen in love with William Price (brother of Fanny now married to Edmund, also friends of the Darcys). She has been encouraged to believe that he cares for her by Mrs George Knightly with whom Kitty has been staying (Emma still getting it wrong). BUT, William Price has fallen in love with Darcy’s sister Georgiana who was engaged to her cousin Fitzwilliam until they agreed they would not suit. Fitzwilliam then bumps into Mary Crawford at Bath and promptly falls in love with her. Tom Bertram also has his eye on Georgiana but is rejected and eventually ends up with Isabella Thorpe, who was briefly engaged to James Morland (see above).
You can therefore see how totally daft it all is and yet it is written with a deft touch, there is something very innocent about it all and I am sure that any Janeite out there will thoroughly enjoy it. I found it whiled away a very pleasant afternoon as I lay on my sofa and I can recommend it for sheer fun.
I am being quiet today and have a simmering saucepan of leek and potato soup on the cooker as I write, and am going to put my feet up again soon preparatory to my first full week back at work on Monday. I am not looking forward to the commute, but it has to be done. Luckily, as I have said before and will say again, I am working for the nicest man on the planet who keeps telling me ‘Elaine you must not overdo it and take it easy’. Once this contract comes to an end I am going to have a financial rethink and budget and see if I can go part time. Gosh that would be so wonderful.
In the meantime, back to the office and back into my routine of posting a bit more regularly again.
Hope everyone is having a lovely weekend
Leave a Reply