LADIES IN WAITING

Eight stories give new life to some of Jane Austen’s overshadowed characters.

In recognition of Austen’s 250th birthday, nine authors have compiled eight stories reimagining some of the secondary and tertiary characters from her beloved tales, placing them against both historical and contemporary backgrounds. Often having only a handful of Austen’s sentences as a jumping-off point, the authors take minor characters like Eliza Brandon, Margaret Dashwood, and Georgiana Darcy, flesh them out, and give them complex, intriguing narratives of their own. Nikki Payne’s reimagining of Pride and Prejudice’s Caroline Bingley as a free woman of color traveling away from her community in New Orleans to marry a complete stranger out West is especially engrossing, as is Eloisa James’ tale of Margaret Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility, now a bit older, out in society and training herself to be a novelist as she waits to fall in love. Diana Quincy’s attention is thoughtfully trained on Lydia Wickham (née Bennet), also from Pride and Prejudice, surprised by a second chance at love after she’s widowed by her wicked husband. Though Sarah MacLean and Elinor Lipman choose very different happy endings for Emma’s Hetty Bates, both are highly satisfying. In keeping with the spirit of Austen’s work, there are multiple life-changing kisses in these stories, but anything spicier than that is kept off the page, and even in the contemporary stories there is a sense of old-fashioned courtliness underlying the different voices. The collection’s primary flaw is that the length of the stories varies widely; some are too long while others feel thin by comparison. Despite this, the collection will have tremendous appeal to Austen’s legion of devoted readers, thanks to the unique and generally well-executed concept.

A joyful celebration of one of the most important writers in English literature.