Mr. Darcy’s Diary is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice from Darcy’s point of view. It does not have as much of a “diary” feel to it as Georgiana Darcy’s Diary, as a real diary would not do a very good job of recording dialog, but as a first person novel with dates indicated (and with the narrator unaware of anything past those dates) it works very well.
It is close to Pride and Prejudice as far as those scenes which mirror those Jane Austen wrote. The scenes with both Darcy and Elizabeth mostly retain the Austen dialog, and the additional scenes in the overlapping time period are mostly those strongly hinted at in the original—Lady Catherine’s descent on Darcy after seeing Elizabeth, for instance. It starts slightly earlier than Pride and Prejudice, with Wickham’s attempt to seduce Georgiana, and continues on for about six months after Austen’s novel ends. I found the extra scenes at the end one of the less satisfying parts of the novel, but I have to say that as a whole it is a very enjoyable read.
Next month I think I will have to reread the original Pride and Prejudice, if only to get my head straight on exactly what Jane Austen herself wrote. After that, I think I will reread what has so far been my favorite retelling from Darcy’s point of view, Pamela Aidan’s Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman.
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So widely admired is Pride and Prejudice today that it’s impossible to imagine our literary landscape without it. And yet, nothing about the novel’s genesis pointed to such a remarkable future. Its early publishing history was in fact downright unpromising. According to the records of Cassandra, Austen at age 20 began drafting the book in October 1796, possibly in epistolary form, under the original title First Impressions. She finished it in August 1797. In November 1797, Austen’s father, always one of his daughter’s greatest fans, wrote a letter inviting the prominent London publisher Thomas Cadell to look at a “Manuscript Novel,” probably First Impressions. Cadell declined the offer, and a few years later the title “First Impressions” appeared on a novel by Margaret Holford. More than 15 years later Thomas Egerton, the publisher of Sense and Sensibility, published Austen’s revised version of Pride and Prejudice, “lop’t and crop’t” as she put it in a letter to Cassandra, and sporting the new title, most likely borrowed from a passage in Cecilia by Frances Burney, the most famous female novelist of the late 18th century. As a market-savvy author, Austen no doubt also favored the alliterative cadence of “pride and prejudice,” something she had employed to good effect in the title of her first published book. Egerton bought the rights to Pride and Prejudice (the only time Austen allowed this) and paid Austen £110 for her labors, £40 short of what she had asked. Details about Pride and Prejudice’s early print runs are imprecise — the scholar Jan Fergus estimates that there were roughly 1,000 first editions and 750 second editions before the end of the year; a third edition was published in 1817.
So widely admired is Pride and Prejudice today that it’s impossible to imagine our literary landscape without it. And yet, nothing about the novel’s genesis pointed to such a remarkable future. Its early publishing history was in fact downright unpromising. According to the records of Cassandra, Austen at age 20 began drafting the book in October 1796, possibly in epistolary form, under the original title First Impressions. She finished it in August 1797. In November 1797, Austen’s father, always one of his daughter’s greatest fans, wrote a letter inviting the prominent London publisher Thomas Cadell to look at a “Manuscript Novel,” probably First Impressions. Cadell declined the offer, and a few years later the title “First Impressions” appeared on a novel by Margaret Holford. More than 15 years later Thomas Egerton, the publisher of Sense and Sensibility, published Austen’s revised version of Pride and Prejudice, “lop’t and crop’t” as she put it in a letter to Cassandra, and sporting the new title, most likely borrowed from a passage in Cecilia by Frances Burney, the most famous female novelist of the late 18th century. As a market-savvy author, Austen no doubt also favored the alliterative cadence of “pride and prejudice,” something she had employed to good effect in the title of her first published book. Egerton bought the rights to Pride and Prejudice (the only time Austen allowed this) and paid Austen £110 for her labors, £40 short of what she had asked. Details about Pride and Prejudice’s early print runs are imprecise — the scholar Jan Fergus estimates that there were roughly 1,000 first editions and 750 second editions before the end of the year; a third edition was published in 1817.