From the Author
Inside the Bennet Wardrobe
“A journey of a thousand li starts beneath one’s feet.”
This saying has been modernized to “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” The meaning of either remains the same. Until you begin you will never reach your destination. Such is the passage undertaken by authors seeking to unravel the truths hidden within their imaginations’ hoard.
My trek of a thousand li began with my unhappiness over how the secondary characters in Pride and Prejudice were shaped. While I thoroughly understood that Austen required Mary, Kitty, and Lydia to act only as foils for ODC, several questions reared their heads.
Into what sort of persons would the junior sisters grow if they transitioned from caricature to complex?Were these young women’s personalities so fixed that they at forty only would be older versions of those sketched by Austen? If the story of P&P is change, why were no other characters afforded the same transformation as the principals?
That was where I began. My original plan was to write three novels—one each about Mary, Kitty, and Lydia—giving the characters the opportunity to grow into women in full. I was resolved to use each character’s original image as a starting point.
How do they embark on their own journeys? The world in which Austen had placed her story was too familiar for readers to find believable my projected resolutions. I needed a way to convincingly offer life-changing arcs. I was equally convinced that they would be found in an alternate universe, one in which the story of the Bennet family was not fiction but rather a biography composed by the Lady. In this reality, Christopher Bennet, the ancestral owner of Longbourn, commissioned a piece of furniture. The craftsman delivered a remarkable cabinet. This wardrobe would transport those of Bennet blood into futures where they could learn that which they must.
Leaving specific plot structures aside, I quickly learned that I was handcuffed by my insistence on three novels. The first problem appeared shortly after I completed Volume One, The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey.
When I turned to the “Kitty book,” the fact that I had sent her to 1886 to escape all who influenced her meant that I needed to create new characters. In specific, I had to find a love interest who would help her grow. That was the genesis for a character sketch which became the second volume of the Wardrobe Series, Henry Fitzwilliam’s War. Here we see what shaped the young Viscount into a man as enigmatic to Kitty Bennet as Fitzwilliam Darcy was to her sister.
I now see that Henry was a watershed moment. This novella freed me to create characters never imagined by Austen.
Suddenly the arc of Kitty Bennet’s life became too long to deal with in a single book. I split The Exile into two parts which became Volumes Three and Five. To cover the gap of thirty-five years between the essential action, Lizzy Bennet Meets the Countess (Volume Four) offered up new information on the lives of several Bennets.
Then everything exploded.
I realized that The Exile: The Countess Visits Longbourn, left unfinished Kitty Bennet’s tale. Oh, there was an end, but I could not move onto Lydia without a denouement. More books were required because I had ignored a much larger canvas. Why did the Wardrobe care one iota about Mary, Kitty, or Lydia? Was it just a dumb box with special features? Was there more?
Each time a Bennet used the cabinet, something was learned: yes, by the Bennets, but who else? In The Avenger: Thomas Bennet and a Father’s Lament (Volume Six)two forces appeared. First, there was The Old One who had existed from before this current timeframe. The second was the power behind the Old One’s Universe. Back to the Canon where the most powerful force is love. In the Wardrobe’s realm, though, there are multiple kinds of love. I have discovered three others on top of Lewis’s four.
The seventh book, The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion, examines the shaping of the flirtatious one into the ton’s dominant figure by three transcendent loves. Pilgrim is a transitional book which provides the through line between 1811 with Kitty’s departure and 1886 with her arrival. Lydia carries the torch through the middle of the Nineteenth Century.
Now, as the curtain begins to draw closed, we come to the final answer to the why of it all. The Wardrobe is manipulating the lives of the Five to save the greatest love story of all creation. One more person, one irredeemably stubborn and not a Bennet, must learn that which is necessary or everything collapses. ‘Nuff said. The final book in the series, The Grail: The Saving of Elizabeth Darcy will be published late this year.
