Kitty & Mary
By the end of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth, Jane and Lydia Bennet are all married, leaving Kitty and Mary stuck at home. They try to follow their sisters in securing their future in the only way an 18th-century girl can, by finding a husband. Bookish Mary is commandeered by Lady Catherine de Bourgh as companion to her free-spirited young cousin, Helena Fitzwilliam, who is being sent as far away as possible from an undesirable romantic entanglement with a mysterious lover. Lady Catherine persuades Mary that colonial India is awash with men in need of a wife, so Mary sets off with Helena, determined never to return home as a spinster. Meanwhile, Kitty discovers that there is a stylish, if self-absorbed new tenant settling into Netherfield Park. She pulls out all the stops to attract his attention. The girls confide their respective adventures through letters and journals.
This novel will be enjoyed by lovers of Pride and Prejudice aged twelve to adult. Much seafaring and domestic detail of both England and India enlivens and contextualises the lives of the sisters, whether landlocked, seagoing or disembarking in imperial Bombay. The epistolary form is a clever strategy for giving us the girls’ rose-tinted version of events, followed by the miserable or surprising truths as confessed in the girls’ journals. Multiple points of view maintain a good pace as two different love stories are revealed. We hear authentically playful, youthful voices in Austen’s style. Their stories also manage to be contemporary in the way they express cultural and sexual diversity and in the way that the novel ultimately disrupts, in different ways, the old-fashioned quest of young girls in search of a husband.
