Review: Mr. and Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy by Sharon Lathan

genre: historical fiction/romance

Lizzie and her Mr. Darcy have gotten married at the end of the 2005 movie version of Pride and Prejudice. This book begins where that left off and occasionally even flashes back to exact scenes from the movie. The book takes us throughout the first several months of their marriage as they fall even more in love and as Lizzy settles into her role as Mrs. Darcy and the mistress of the Pemberly estate.

One thing I think the author does particularly well is surround us by the Regency period. The language, the tones of conversations and the atmosphere felt authentic to original Austen (although, like I said, the plot is truer to the movie version than to the original book). Even the characters, for the most part, felt genuine and their behavior consistent. What did not feel so authentic to me was the amount and level of detail in the "bedroom" scenes. To be completely truthful, I would classify the book as a romance novel, chiefly for the fact that I was sometimes skimming through two, three pages of detailed romantic interludes.

I liked the interactions between husband and wife when they were not being "intimate," but these scenes felt cut short, always, by their desires for each other - often making me feel that the plot was lacking. It got a bit frustrating because I did like the world that Lathan had created and wanted to spend more time with Lizzy and Darcy out in it! Scenes where Lizzy was meeting Derbyshire society and when she was acting as hostess at Pemberly stand out as ones I particularly liked reading.

In the end, I think your pleasure in this novel will be what you are interesting in finding there. If you want a story of true love - a couple perfectly matched and infatuated with each other and living in a splendid historical time period, than this is the book for you.