Authors: C.P. Odom
Consequences (45 page)
Q
What was the age differential between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, given he dies so early in “Book 1”? Can it be determined from Pride and Prejudice, or is it a matter of supposition?
A
I think it’s probably more a matter of the author’s supposition than anything definitive from Austen. I read the average age for a gentleman to marry in Regency times was about twenty-nine or thirty, and gentlemen typically chose brides about ten years younger. Given what was said about Mr. Bennet being “captivated by youth and beauty” and the “appearance of good humor which youth and beauty” often give, I would guess Mrs. Bennet was no more than 18 when they married. That would be about a twelve-year difference that could have easily been as much as fifteen had Mr. Bennet waited until thirty-three. However, marrying a young lady who is so mismatched to his own attributes sounds like the kind of mistake a younger man would make, so it is certainly a debatable point.
Q
A certain amount of original Austen text was used in your book, especially in “Book 1,” in the letters, for example. What was your guideline in using the original text?
A
Much of “Book 1” follows the original storyline up until the moment when the injury to Darcy’s horse prevents the very coincidental meeting of Darcy and Elizabeth at Pemberley. Up until that moment, I was really compelled to follow the storyline and give enough information to the reader who might not be conversant enough with Austen’s works to allow him or her to follow the plot. While I tried to stay away from simply replicating what Austen wrote, there were a number of instances, specifically the letters, where I couldn’t see any way to inform the casual reader without including at least a measure of the text from
Pride and Prejudice
. When I wrote and posted the original version of this novel as Internet fan fiction, I could omit large sections of the text, knowing virtually all of the readers were familiar with the story and could concentrate on those areas that were different. I couldn’t do the same with the published version for the above reasons.
Once the pivotal moment was past, however, I was no longer under those restraints and could invent thoughts and conversations to fit the situation. In the carriage ride back to Longbourn after leaving Pemberley, the conversation resembles the conversation from the book but I felt free to alter and massage and invent as I pleased. The subject was the same, but since the party did not meet Darcy, his sister, and the Bingley party, I felt the conversation could wander in any direction since some motivations, such as Elizabeth trying to conceal her new attraction to Darcy, were missing.
Q
At certain points, as in “Book I,” which followed the basic outline of Austen’s text, there were points where a reader familiar with Pride and Prejudice would expect Darcy to appear and might become anxious when he didn’t show up. A couple of examples would be when Elizabeth was in the garden at Pemberley or when Lydia was lost in London instead of being located by Darcy as in Austen’s novel. It seemed as if you used Austen’s text to foster a feeling of expectation in the reader. Was that your intention, to emphasize a pivotal moment where events differed from the original book and thus led in a different direction?
A
I had to stick close to the storyline in “Book 1” until Darcy did not show up to meet Elizabeth in the Pemberley garden. And certainly I used portions of Austen’s text to follow that storyline, though I tried to keep it to a minimum so the reader had something different to read. I know Pride and Prejudice is in the public domain, so I could have just copied everything from page 1 until Darcy’s horse goes lame, but I’m certain the reader would not want to read such a treatment. I may be an engineer by training and a self-taught author, but my mother, Mrs. Odom, didn’t raise me to be that stupid! Or lazy.
As for making the reader feel anxiety, that is an unexpected but fortuitous by-product of the writing process. I didn’t set out to explicitly invoke that reaction from the reader. But, while I knew better than to simply replicate Austen’s text, I still wanted to use enough referents to make the reader—and the author!—feel the connection to the original book. Let’s face it—most of us who enjoy these types of novels do so because we love Austen’s works in general and
Pride and Prejudice
in particular. I’ve read it at least twenty times. Some of those re-readings were done as research for my original fan fiction postings, but I also purchased two audiobooks and listened to them on my iPod more than once (
Pride and Prejudice
sounds better when the reader has an English accent, don’t you think?). Strange as it is for a one-time football player, former Marine, woodworker, science-fiction aficionado, and left-brained engineer, I dearly love the novel. And I think any reader who got this far feels similarly.
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