“Well, it seems to be a given that
when a bloke's made his pile (or waited for his Pa to peg it), he's
ready to commit longterm to install some lucky woman to, like, run
his crib and die having his babies.” Poor Lydia Bennet, she and her
sister Kitty have coming rushing home from Meryton with some really
hot goss about the imminent arrival of SOLDIERS – “phwooar! Give
me a man with a long sword and tight pantaloons”-- only to find the
rest of their family engrossed by the news that “some minted single
geezer's moving in to nearby Netherfield.”
And not just the “loaded” Bingley,
oh no! There's the Alpha Git himself “Arsey Darcy” who finds
himself needing to keep his back to the wall after Lydia's had one of
her characteristic accidents spilling hot chocolate down his creamy
pantaloons. Valerie Laws's Lydia Bennet's Blog is funny,
crude, clever and a linguistic tour-de-force. Lydia does not speak as
a 2013 teen, nor in the language of 1813 Pride and Prejudice.
She has her own unique style – streetwise, assertive and the very
“epitaph of cool”. She should be starring in a Miranda Hart
comedy series, or Miranda, her mother and friends would fit nicely in
her world, “the chosen road to desperationville” where the height
of “thrilldom” is trudging to a single shop and looking “at the
same three hats for at least five years, swear down.” (That word "die" in her translation of the famous first sentence immediately lifts it above simple parody to a sharply realistic critique.)
The cleverness of Lydia Bennet's
Blog is remaining faithful, episode after episode, to the
original. Laws has to exercise a considerable amount of ingenuity to
ensure that Lydia can witness key events in the narrative but she
manages adroitly. Her Lydia is resourceful and manipulative. It is she
who is so well wired in to the invisible network of servants
connecting the gentry houses that she's able to smuggle herself into
Netherfield or get the “goss” from Lucas Lodge. Lydia is in
charge of plot development and it is she who fixes the Charlotte Lucas / Mr Collins
marriage and ensures Elizabeth and Darcy meet at Pemberley. She is
also shrewd. She condemns her father for “dissing” his
daughters and is constantly sympathetic to “poor old Ma”.
Hers is a perfectly valid materialistic
standpoint and it's a tribute to the greatness of Pride and
Prejudice that it can survive this perspective just as well as
Romeo and Juliet survives when played by bikers and leathers.
I was writing digital revision supplements for York Notes when I read
Lydia Bennet's Blog. The novel can be considered from a
Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic critical angle and
has something extra to give every time. It seemed to me that A level
or undergraduate students could perfectly well justify spending some of their study-time reconsidering events though Lydia's wide eyes.
The rest of us, fortunately, need only
laugh – and admire.
Reviewed by Julia Jones
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