PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: Annabella Bloom & Jane Austen

My suspicions should have been raised by the circular red balloon which reads The WILD &; WANTON edition,. published by Adams Media,  Shamelessly plagiarized by Bloom from the original by Jane Austen,  about ten pages of sexy encounter between Darcy and Elizabeth very near the end of the book have been added.  Lydia is portrayed as wanton and totally without scruples or morals in the early chapters, briefly.

The Jane Austen sequels which have been well written and original are take-offs on what might have been 'if' some other course was taken,k or they are set in another time period, or written in a way that clearly marks them as simply based on Jane Austen material but most is different and the story is made captivating.  Recently, some publishers decided to capture more of a market by renaming previously published books to include the Darcy name, reselling in the belief that the Darcy name in the title will pull in more readers.  Good authors have lost credibility by many of their readers who thought it a ploy of the author rather than the publisher and felt duped.

Excluding the original Austen P & P, I've now read 88 of these, skipping those others published in which Darcy is a Vampire or as equally unrelated to the Austen book.  For those of us who are true Austen fans, marketers/publishers need to understand they lose, not gain, readers with these tactics.  It is greedy, misleading,  damaging to good authors, and garners bad publicity for the publishers and sellers.  Readers, especially  those of us who buy the books, beware.  If you don't want to spend hours waiting for the book to be as it was advertised, you may end up almost  478 pages later feeling profoundly cheated  Steer clear of this one.


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CAUTION: AUTHORS PLAGIARIZING THEMSELVES

Addenda from Yiayia...Apparently readers failed to see my 'tongue in cheek' use of the world plagiarize.  Obviously one cannot plagiarize one's own work and I publicly apologize to authors who may have misunderstood and taken offense, especially to the wonderful author.made visible by the book covers since she is one of my favorites and I heartily recommend her books to anyone who loves this genre as much as I.. 

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was such a favorite of mine that I have been buying most all new versions of it (and sequels) I can find..  One I refused to read was: Mr. Darcy, Vampyre.  I really thought that was just too insulting to Austen's original..

It is easy to understand why a new version requires much of the original dialogue at times. I recently ordered a book whose title I did not own though I had read that author before and liked her.  When the book arrived, I eagerly started to read it and wondered at its familiarity.  Since I often read the few pages Amazon provides, to review, I hoped that was what I was remembering.  However, it became just too many pages. Having liked the original, Impulse and Initiative, I read, on as I frequently like to relax re-reading when I know I don't have to worry through the suspense.  I thought I had missed something when it didn't seem to be as I remembered it.  My count of such books is currently 82 so I read on, thinking that I must have skipped what I was now missing.

Nevertheless, being obstinate, I compared the books paragraph for paragraph for several chapters.  The author had changed 'knocked' to 'rap' in a later version and a few words here or there were slightly different though the meaning and general story stayed the same.  However, the new version, To Conquer Mr. Darcy was not easily associated by me with Impulse and Initiative.  In the newer version, the paperback, the author had left out a whole sub-plot which made Caroline Bingley a worse conniving villain than her usual cattiness and attempt to disparage Elizabeth.  It didn't essentially change the story, it simply removed a piece of it.

However, it made me wonder.  What are the rules of selling a book without telling the reader beforehand that it is simply a rewrite of a previously published book with little change?  I don't know what publisher's rules are but I can certainly comment on the view as a reader. The seller should make it possible for me know if I might already have bought a copy of this book.  Before I buy, I check my database to see if I already own it.  When I don't see it there, I read the blurbs the seller has on the book.  Having done this, there was nothing to connect the two since most of the sequels have the same characters and many don't deviate that far from the basic premise of the original Pride and Prejudice.  Only when I received the book, read it, and checked the very fine print on the bottom of the Copyright page did I learn it had previously been published  in 2008 by Sourcebooks Landmark as Impulse and Initiative.  Amazon showed it as a 2010 book.

Addenda from Yiayia...Apparently readers failed to see my 'tongue in cheek' use of the world plagiarize.  Obviously one cannot plagiarize one's own work and I publicly apologize to authors who may have taken misunderstood and taken offense. 

TRYING TO FIND DEFINITIONS FOR WORDS I READ

For several months I have indulged myself reading 19th C romantic novels...because the format for them demands a happy ending. Sometimes I develop a list of twenty or more words I do not understand (though I can guess at the meaning by the context though, compulsive soul that I am, I force myself to confirm that I have guessed accurately. My double volume, minuscule-print, OED (Oxford English Dictionary)has been so little used since searches have usually been on the computer/Internet. I need a ladder to reach the OED. However, I am currently being driven to yank it down because our modern dictionaries do not have most of these words; a loss for the language.

Whether the author's sources vary from mine, words are either misspelled or have changed. This makes it even more difficult to trace definitions. Pride and Prejudice sequel authors who, properly, try to write in the language of the times, give me the most look-ups. Words like alt, amanuensis, chary, concupiscence, ensorcell, fubsy (a definition of me), impuissance....and, no, I am not going to give you all the definitions. However, I can let you know that there is a great free dictionary on these words if you check out http://dictionary.reference.com/. Good luck if you care enough to work hard at understanding the world and words.