Review by Allison T.

What if….Ah, the charm of the what-if story! What if Captain Ahab had said, “Screw it, I’m tired of chasing this hemm’d great fish—I’m going back to graduate school to get a degree in social work so that I can ameliorate the lives of Queequeg and his people”? What if Hamlet and Ophelia had scored some Prozac, hired a family counselor, sorted the Danish royal family, and gotten married to live happily ever after? What if Jane Eyre, upon hearing of the mad wife in the attic, had said, “Oh, hell, Edward, let’s chuck Victorian morality and Evangelical Christianity and go live in sin in southern France!”? What if Darcy refused to take Elizabeth’s “No” at Rosings, followed her back to Longbourne within a month or two of her initial refusal, and, by dint of snogging her (as our friends across The Pond so undeliciously put it) at every opportunity—snogging in the shrubbery, snogging in the wilderness, snogging in the churchyard—causes Elizabeth to sleep with him before marriage while staying at Pemberley with her aunt and uncle Gardiner, and otherwise changes the story that Austen gave us? For such is the plot of Abigail Reynold’s Impulse & Initiative; A Pride & Prejudice Variation—“What if Mr. Darcy didn’t take ‘No’ for an answer?” Continue reading