Guest Post + Book Excerpt - Yours Affectionaly, Jane Austen by Sally Smith O'Rourke
Was
Mr. Darcy real?
In this year, the 200th
anniversary of Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice, it seems a relevant question. In reading biographies of Jane
Austen it becomes apparent that the famed author based almost all of the
characters in her books on the people in her life. Some, like friends and
family, were people with whom she was very close, some were neighbors, others
were merely passing acquaintances and very likely there were people she had
never met but had observed.
The one character that most Austen
biographers have never been able to identify is Mr. Darcy. There are many
theories, of course, but unlike virtually all her other characters Mr. Darcy of
Pemberley remains an enigma.
Fitzwilliam Darcy was different in 1813
when the literary world met him for the first time and he is different today. A
man of his stature and wealth would very likely, even today, have simply walked
away from a rejection such as Elizabeth Bennet’s. Never having been told no and
used to people bowing to his every whim he is initially shocked and angered by
such impertinence; but ultimately he is dissatisfied with himself. Humbled by her reproof, he makes a concerted
effort to change, not to win Elizabeth’s hand, but to become a man able to
please a woman worthy of being pleased. Darcy is the ultimate romantic lead
because he altered his perceptions and prejudices. How Austen came to write so
uncommon a man for any time intrigued me and sent me on the journey that
brought about the creation of The Man Who
Loved Jane Austen.
In the late 1990s my late husband, Michael
and I vacated our home at the recommendation of the Health Department because
the house was harboring toxic mold. In an attempt to redirect what had become
an obsession with the house and resulting law suit, we sat down one night and
watched the wonderful Andrew Davies adaptation of Pride and Prejudice; all five hours of it in one sitting. In
continuing our non-obsession plan I re-read the book and then all of Austen’s other
writings and became fascinated with the author herself. Not only had she created
the inimitable Mr. Darcy but heroines that were strong and independent.
By the time I had finished reading all six
of Austen’s novels and three biographies Mike was ready to start a new project
and suggested that we resurrect a time travel story I’d started a few years
before but never finished. However, I suggested something else entirely and The Man Who Loved Jane Austen was born.
In our hands Darcy became a Virginia horse
breeder whose family history stretches back to the revolution. On a trip to
England to purchase, Lord Nelson, a champion jumper, Darcy is injured when
thrown from the horse and wakes up in Jane Austen’s bed. So begins his journey
to 1810.
Darcy couldn’t have a permanent
relationship with Austen so we created Eliza Knight, successful New York artist.
Eliza triggers the story in The Man Who
Loved Jane Austen when she finds two letters in an antique vanity. One is
an open letter from an F. Darcy to Jane Austen and the other, sealed with a
fanciful letter ‘A’, to Fitzwilliam Darcy from Jane Austen.
Even though Mike was a published author
(dark fiction as Michael O’Rourke and political thrillers as F.M. O’Rourke) we
made no attempt to get the book published and I can’t really tell you why. I
don’t know if time has stripped me of the memory or if it just wasn’t
important. We had written the book for us. Mike called it the ultimate
valentine because it came out of the love we had for each other. So after completing
the manuscript, we type-set, printed and hand-bound copies of it and gave them
as gifts to family and friends. Then my world crashed and burned. In November
2001, two weeks before his sixtieth birthday Mike died suddenly; we had not
gotten out of the house soon enough.
The
Man Who Loved Jane Austen sat on the shelf for
several years while I struggled through the grief and worked at putting my life
back together. Once I was thinking straight again I realized that I didn’t want
our little story to die with Mike.
The
Man Who Loved Jane Austen was published in 2006.
The publisher didn’t want two names on the cover (which was how I had presented
it) and preferred the one name be mine as I would be doing revisions and
promotions. So only my name appears on the cover of the book. I often regret
not insisting that Mike’s name be used as a tribute to him. But regret serves
no useful purpose and people from all over the world have read and enjoyed his
work and that was my objective.
One of the things I’ve always considered
odd is that no journals or diaries written by Jane Austen have survived. Did
she not keep any because she was busy writing fiction or were they destroyed,
like so many of her letters, by her family’s misguided attempt to protect her
legacy?
Whatever the reason, I thought it might be
fun to create a journal chronicling the Spring of 1810 when Jane met Mr. Darcy,
from her point of view. But who was I to write as though I was Jane Austen?!?
Instead I decided to write a story that
takes place for Jane, the summer of 1813 after the successful publication of Pride and Prejudice and for Darcy the
week following his heritage Rose Ball from the end of The Man Who Loved Jane Austen.
Yours Affectionately, Jane Austen reacquaints readers with Americans Fitz Darcy and Eliza Knight,
juxtaposing their blossoming relationship with Jane Austen’s life as she copes
with the subtle celebrity of being ‘the lady’ who wrote Sense and Sensibility and Pride
and Prejudice. Yours Affectionately, Jane Austen delves into the complex
nature of the man who is the embodiment of Jane Austen’s most romantic and
legendary hero and the women who love him.
Book Excerpt
Yours Affectionately, Jane
Austen
Chapter 5
Although the sun was fully up in the Virginia summer sky, it was not
yet hot. Fitz found jumping exhilarating; the cool morning air caressing his
face, and Lord Nelson, so strong and graceful, took all the jumps with no
effort.
Heritage Week was over so things could get back to normal. He
shrugged. Whatever normal is. He
realized there was a very good chance that his normal was about to change
radically. Eliza’s letter—the one she had found written to him from Jane—had
ended his search for the truth of his Regency encounter. But Eliza did much
more than give him the letter.
He had been merely surviving, not living, in the years since his
mother’s death. He’d thrown himself into the business of Pemberley Farms to the
exclusion of almost everything else. Eliza’s arrival had heralded an acute
awareness of that fact. It was as though a light was suddenly shining so he
could see the world around him. She made him want to live again. And she had
given him the letter… Jane’s letter.
Fitz reined Lord Nelson to a walk as they entered the cool shade of
the woods on the edge of his property.
Jane. He had spent more than three years seeking proof of his
meeting with her and of her feelings for him. Almost as if he’d been
transported again back to Chawton in 1810, the image of Jane’s sweet face
flooded his mind. He thought back to that morning and his inauspicious entrance
into Jane Austen’s life.
The combination of his head injury and the laudanum prescribed by
Mr. Hudson, the Austen family physician, caused Darcy to slip in and out of
consciousness. He tried to sit up, the effort making him dizzy.
Jane gently laid a hand on his chest. “Please, Mr. Darcy, Mr. Hudson
wants you to remain still.”
Through a cotton mouth, his head spinning, Darcy asked, “Mr.
Hudson?”
“The doctor,” Jane said. “You must rest now Mr. Darcy.” The American
looked at her face. Her curiosity was palpable even in his drugged state.
Unable to think clearly, never mind responding to questions he wasn’t sure he
could answer, he closed his eyes completely and turned his head away.
Jane returned to her vanity table where she continued to write; a
single candle and the flames in the fireplace her only light. Interrupted in
her writing by a low murmur from Darcy, she took the candle and quietly
approached the bed. He was tossing back and forth, his face flushed and
contorted; he was speaking in quiet tones, a hodgepodge of words that meant
nothing to her. He spoke what she could only suppose were the nonsensical
ramblings of a sick brain; she attributed words like television and jet to his
head injury and delirium. She placed her hand softly on his cheek and was
distressed by the heat radiating from him. Using fresh linen soaked in water
from the pitcher on her wash stand, Jane swabbed his face and neck, then laid
it across his forehead. It seemed to calm him and she went back to her writing.
Each time he grew restless Jane stopped writing and went to the bed
to refresh the linen with cool water. After three episodes in close succession
she remained on the edge of the bed so she was at hand, and each time he
started to toss and turn she would caress his face and neck with the cool, damp
linen in hopes that it would, in time, reduce his fever.
She stayed there until Darcy’s features turned placid and he was
breathing more evenly. He finally seemed to be sleeping comfortably. She laid
her small, soft hand on his cheek. The fever was broken. She dropped the cloth
into the basin. Stiff from sitting in one position for so long without support,
she stood up and stretched. She was not particularly tired but needed to get
some rest.
Quietly she crossed the wooden floor and slipped the small pages of
writing she was working on into the drawer of the vanity, then took a nightgown
from the closet next to the fireplace. Glancing back at the bed she stepped
behind the screen.
He opened his eyes just enough to see her slender, full-breasted
figure silhouetted on the muslin screen, back-lit by the remnants of the fire
as the light fabric of her nightgown floated down to envelope her.
Jane stopped at the bed before making her way to Cassandra’s room
for a few hours of sleep. As she stood over him he watched surreptitiously
through the veil of his eyelashes. She leaned down and whispered, “Good night,
Mr. Darcy,” almost brushing his lips with her own. In spite of his continuing
laudanum haze, he could see that her eyes were filled with a tenderness that
caused him to grab her hand as she straightened up; he didn’t want her to go.
Without opening his eyes or letting go of her hand he said, “Please
don’t leave me.”
Unsure whether this was further evidence of the delirium or whether
he was actually requesting her presence, she pulled her hand away. He did not
move to take it again but said, “Please, stay.”
Cognizant of Mr. Hudson’s admonition of keeping the injured American
calm and concerned her leaving might agitate him, Jane sat once again on the
edge of the bed. Darcy smiled in the flickering flame of the dying fire. He
said nothing more but gently took her hand. He did not relinquish it again
until she rose to move to a chair by the side of the bed where she finally
slept.
The movement woke him. His mind finally clear of drugs, he scanned
the room in the dim, pre-dawn light. There were no electrical outlets or
switches, no lamps, television or telephone, and the only clock appeared to be
pendulum driven. Everyone he’d seen wore costumes similar to the ones people
wore to the Rose Ball. Those things and the medical treatment he had received
led him to the inexplicable conclusion that somehow he’d fallen into another
time—a time when Jane Austen was alive.
And there she sat, serene in what had to be an uncomfortable
position for sleep; his nurse, his savior and much prettier than she was
depicted in the only portrait of her to survive to the twenty-first century.
She was not the brazen hussy of Darcy family lore but a sweet and loving woman
who took care of him without concern for her own safety or expecting anything
in return. His mother would have said she was a true Christian.
As he watched her in the pale light of the dying embers his head
started to throb as though a nail was being driven through it. He closed his
eyes and blessed sleep overtook him.
Jane was an incredibly strong, intelligent, willful and virtuous
woman who followed the propriety of the day… mostly. During the last three
years he’d often wondered what might have happened between them if he’d been
forced to stay in early nineteenth-century England. Of course with the way her
brothers felt about him, he probably wouldn’t have seen her again.
If the circumstances had been different would he have married her?
He could have been happy with her, he supposed, but over the years he’d come to
realize that the love he felt for her was based on who she was, the awe in
which he held her, caring for him when she certainly didn’t have to, loving
him. Then again, did she love him?
She had never said it and the letter Eliza had found and given him showed
obvious affection but she urged him to find his true love. Apparently she
didn’t think she was it. Had they ever loved each other or had it just been a
fling across the ages?
He laughed. What difference did any of it make? Jane Austen had been
dead for almost two hundred years. Still, the undisputed icon of witty English
romance had kissed him whether she loved him or not. He still had to pinch
himself to believe it had ever happened.
He had no such questions about Eliza. Everything felt right when he
was with her. This was no fling. He had no idea where they were headed, but for
the first time in years he was looking forward to the rest of his life. As long
as Eliza was with him he didn’t care where they were headed.
Fitz and Lord Nelson crossed the bridge at a leisurely gait; the
ground fog was burning off in the warm morning sun. Had it really been only two
days since he and the great stallion were galloping across the bridge before
the fog had lifted and run Eliza off the road and into a muddy drainage ditch?
He hadn’t even realized she was there until it had happened. When he did, he
brought Nelson to a stop and, without questioning who she was or why she was
walking along a road on his property, he had lifted her onto Lord Nelson’s back
and then swung up behind her. She was slightly light headed from the sudden
fall, and once on the horse she had leaned against his chest and he’d had to
control a strong desire to kiss the top of her head. He still didn’t understand
how a complete stranger could make him feel that way, but he didn’t really
care. From the first moment, being with her felt right and wonderful and that
was all that mattered.
She had touched something in him that no one else ever had,
including Jane, even before he knew her. At the Austen exhibit at the New York
Public Library he had found himself staring at her. He laughed remembering that
he had thought of her as a raven-haired beauty. Then two days ago she had come
out of the fog and into his life.
He had told her his story about jumping through a rift in time and
meeting Jane Austen. It had been very difficult at first, but once he started
it tumbled out and had been a relief that he wasn’t carrying it around anymore.
It was as though a weight had been lifted and this slight, feisty New Yorker
had done the lifting. She had listened to him with an intensity that had made her
a part of the story. She had been kind and compassionate—he had seen real grief
when she asked him about leaving Jane—and she had given him the letter that
answered his questions about whether he’d actually met Jane Austen and how Jane
felt about him.
Jane would always hold a special place in his heart, but Eliza held
his heart. Maybe it was too early to take it all for love, but it certainly
felt the way he'd always thought love is supposed to feel.
Horse and rider stepped out from the cool canopy of the woods and
into the warm summer sun. Spurring his favorite horse to a full gallop Fitz
guided him over every fence and stream on their way back to the barn.
Sally Smith O'Rourke Links:
VIDEO TRAILERS
Yours Affectionately, Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice, a celebration
The Maidenstone Lighthouse
Christmas at Sea Pines Cottage
Yours Affectionately, Jane Austen – Beachy
Chawton Cottage
