Tag: ormiston

Review: Unequal Affections by Lara S Ormiston (2013) [Trad]

Posted June 8, 2021 by Mary Kingswood in P+P Variation, Review / 4 Comments

This is only the second P&P variation I’ve ever read [*], and possibly the most expensive ebook I’ve ever bought, but it’s hard to imagine there will ever be anything to top it. The author took two characters we feel we already know well and peeled back layer after layer to reveal every last fascinating nuance of their characters. It’s a virtuoso performance. Perfection.

Here’s the premise: apart from a brief prologue with Bingley, the story opens precisely in chapter 34. Darcy has just made his first, insulting proposal to Elizabeth at Hunsford Parsonage and is waiting complacently for her acceptance. We know how that went in the book! But instead of impetuously rejecting him out of hand, Elizabeth stops to think. He loves her! And loves her so well that he is prepared to make for himself the sacrifice that he deterred Bingley from, and marry into a family beneath his own, in wealth, social status, education and manners. He will put up with her hideous relations for her sake. She realises that she will never again have such a good offer, she can rescue all her family (including herself) from poverty and provide herself with a man who feels an overwhelming passion for her. So she asks for time to consider the offer.

Obviously (because the story would be no different from the book otherwise) she accepts him. They spend a little time in London, where he realises that she has relations of whom she need not be ashamed (the Gardiners), and she realises that amongst his social equals, he can be perfectly agreeable. It’s only when the main characters move back to Longbourn and Darcy bumps up against the disaster that is Elizabeth’s family that things begin to fray around the edges.

This tips the story straight into a maelstrom of discordant emotions. Where Austen is relatively dispassionate, Ormiston brings the muddled feelings of the protagonists to centre stage. Darcy is overwhelmed with love for Elizabeth, but still the proud, supercilious man he is in the early part of the book. He knows intellectually that he has to make sacrifices for Elizabeth, but he thinks it will be a short-lived difficulty, and that as soon as he can whisk her off to Pemberley and away from her awful relations, everything will be wonderful. And Elizabeth is torn between gratitude – he loves her! – and the cold fear that she’s only marrying him for material advantage, and what sort of foundation is that for marriage anyway?

So yes, this is all about the angst, the swirl of awkwardness that is bound to surround two such different people, from very different worlds, marrying for very different reasons. But Ormiston gets wonderfully under the skin of both of them. Elizabeth’s perky self-confidence is gradually stripped away as she begins to realise the enormity of what she’s taken on, and the challenge of keeping Darcy happy, not just through the honeymoon period but for a lifetime. And yet she feels the full force of the power she has over him, of knowing that she has only to smile or lift one eyebrow to bring him to her side.

As for Darcy, we see a side of him that, frankly, never emerges in the book. We see his weaknesses and yes, his vulnerability, on full display. He is tender, gentle and determinedly passionate, and honestly, I’d have married him in a minute, I can tell you. The book softens Darcy and erodes his pride, but it never reduces him to this desperate shell of himself. And yet Ormiston never once made me feel that this was anything other than the Darcy of the books. We just see him exposed in all his complex layers. It’s an awesome performance.

The way they tiptoe around each other is brilliantly drawn. They really know very little of each other’s characters and beliefs (and that was absolutely how it was in the Regency – society combined to keep men and women apart until they decided to marry, so this delicate little dance is spot on). There are two steps forward and one back, meetings when everything goes smoothly and other times when one or the other is cast into despair, wondering what on earth they’ve got themselves into. There are kisses, quite a lot of kisses, actually, but every one is different and the circumstances that lead to them and the consequences of each one are fascinating. But Darcy is utterly steadfast in his love for Elizabeth, and that love (combined with Elizabeth’s outspokenness and willingness to meet him halfway) eventually rips away every last shred of pride. He begins to understand what he has to do to be worthy of her, and she begins to appreciate just what a wonderful man she’s found.

The title of the book tells the story – these two start out with unequal affections, Darcy so overwhelmed with love that he would do anything, absolutely anything, to win Elizabeth. He just doesn’t quite realise what it will take. And he’s utterly confident that he can make her love him in the end. How he comes to realise that, perhaps, that might never be possible and face up to the prospect, and how Elizabeth’s own feelings come to change forms the bulk of the book. The plot actually follows the book rather well, although with some obvious differences, since Darcy and Elizabeth are now engaged. But there are certain scenes and even phrases that come straight from the book, and the divergences are all perfectly logical.

There are plenty of Pride and Prejudice variations that are only tenuously rooted in the book. This is not one of them. This feels like the real Darcy and Elizabeth, but seen from a completely different angle. Much of what they experience here they would have gone through anyway after the wedding – that awkward getting-to-know-you phase of marriage. Here it all happens beforehand in brilliantly realised detail. Austen purists could safely read this and feel they were only adding to their understanding of the couple. And it’s not just the main characters that are perfectly drawn – I heard all of them speaking in the voices of the actors in the 1995 version, that’s how real it felt. It’s a crying shame that Ormiston seems not to have written anything else, but one perfect book is a fine legacy. Five stars.

[*] The other was Thaw by Anniina Sjöblom, which was also wonderful, in a different way.

Tags: