Delightful!
Here is Colin Firth in a wet shirt.
I’ll let you enjoy that image for a bit. Take your time. I’ll wait.
Imagine if you will, a British holiday spot called Pembrook Park, where it is 1816 all the time, where guests dress in Regency period costume, address each other as Miss so’n’so and follow strict etiquette rules. It is Jane Austen era, and in visiting Pembrook Park, you’ve just stepped into one of her novels. Where do I sign up!
Jane Hayes is a graphic artist living in New York and drifting from one bad relationship to another. She is obsessed with Jane Austen, and hides her copy of the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle movie version of Pride and Prejudice in a house plant. Why? Because even after all these years of dating, she’s still looking for Mr. Darcy, a fictional character she rationally knows doesn’t exist in the real world, but that hasn’t stopped the fantasies.
When an elderly aunt bequeaths Jane a three week vacation to Pembrook Park, Jane figures it’s time for one last Austen hurrah before leaving the fantasies behind for good. So off to England she goes and finds herself immersed in Austenland where nothing is real and actors are paid to fall in love with her. Struggling to find herself, she comes to the realization Mr. Darcy in real life would have been “a boring, pompous pinhead” and that what she longs for is simply “someone who made me feel all the time like I felt when I watched those movies.” And in the end, isn’t that what we all want?
Shannon Hale writes a delightful book that speaks to all Austen fans. What if we could step back into Austen’s world for a brief time and live out her stories. Be Fanny Price for a few weeks, pining for her Edmund, or Anne Elliot, reuniting with her Captain Wentworth, or best of all, Elizabeth Bennett, sparing verbally with Mr. Darcy. And where in the end, all things have a happy ending.
The starry-eyed romantic in me is off to revisit the best of Austenland....Till next time, happy reading!
L :)
| TBR = 10 | WPL = 23 |
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