Customer Reviews

An Unequal Marriage, Or, Pride and Prejudice Twenty Years Later

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What a Horrible, HORRIBLE book! The sitcom-esq ending where everything is wrapped up in the last 3 pages as all a big misunderstanding do nothing to save this book.

After 19 years of marriage Elizabeth and Darcy are "sooo" much in love, that is until they receive some bad news, and Darcy concludes that he made a mistake in perusing Elizabeth after he learned of her family's insanity all those years ago. AND TELLS HER SO! Elizabeth, in turn, realizes that Darcy is a "monster," and wishes for equality of the sexes so that she may get a divorce. Her realization of her superior character is what inspires the title of "an unequal marriage." This also leads her to become bitter about Jane's happiness.

Of the 180 so pages of this book over 170 are dedicated to the hatred and resentment of the Darcys. This book is written from bitterness and contempt of love. It has nothing to do with the original sentiments of Austin, and is uninteresting and depressing in its own right. The shortness of the book make it undeveloped and do nothing to justify the stream ill events and bad feelings.

The book only serves as a laundry list of bad happenings and despair only to have the curtain whipped aside at the very end to say "silly Elizabeth, none of that's true - now lets go to Italy and be Rich!" All of the fair-weather love and weak loyalties are supposed to be forgotten in the end pronouncement of an undying and strong love. This sentiment is our reward for wading through the dreadfulness of the book.

Silly reader! Don't waste your time, money or good feelings on this wretched excuse for a story of love.

I love P&P and while I am realistic enough to know that no one can write like Jane Austen. However, in the spirit of Austen and having read that Elizabeth was a favorite of hers I would think that better things were in store for the Darcys.

This book was so repulsive and disgusting I couldn't even look at it! I could barely finish it. I had to read the original a few times to get myself back on track.

Think of it this way, The Bar Sinister and Presumption were better and that's saying a good bit. I am following my conscience and the opinions of other readers---I am staying away from Emma Tennant!

_Pemberley_, this author's first pseudo-sequal to _Pride and Prejudice_, was a shamefully bad book, and a horrid disappointment to Jane Austen fans.

This author's second try is a bit better, and the Austen fan will probably be able to go five chapters or so before putting the book down in distaste.

While it's slightly more polished, it's still an abominable mishandling of the characters found in the original _Pride and Prejudice_.

I recommend passing on this book. Austen was an artist. This author is not.

If you love P&P as I do, you will hate this book as I did. It was so far from the P&P characters. It wasn't even worth the read. It was so bad I didn't even finish it. It should not be called a sequel

This book is unbelivable. Lizzy and Darcy's oldest son is like another Wickam. Which would never happen if Jane A had written the book .This is the second book of Emma Tennant's that I have read the first being Pemberly, and I am not impressed in the least. She is a disgrace to the proffesion of being a author. She should be publically disgraced.

At first, I was so excited when I found this book. I was eager to read a sequel to P&P. However I was soon dissapointed! I wish I had never read this book. Jane Austen would have been greatly offended by this sequel!

I read this book as a teenager, and it put me off sequels for a *long* time!

Jane Austen was undoubtedly a master at her craft and a hard act to follow, however that doesn't appear to be the issue here.

It is *not* a sequel to P&P. The characters bear no resemblance (except in name) to those in P&P. Jane Austen has many (underlying) fascinating themes in P&P, and not a single one is believably taken up by this sequel (okay, maybe I'm prejudiced - no pun intended - but...). I agree with those who call it a soap-opera. It might be an analysis of the ups and downs of marriage, but why the Darcys were picked is beyond me, as almost all facets of their P&P personalities appear ignored in this book. This sequel might just as easily be based on any other fictional couple.

It will not please die-hard P&P or Austen fans, and it will certainly not please anyone looking for a sequel that has a sense of continuation from the original.

This book is an atrocity! It takes the beloved characters from P&P and twists them so badly you don't even recognize them. Elizabeth seems meek and cowardly...not like her true sprited character at all. Jane is the one in this book that shows great character and has the great marriage with Bingley. I enjoyed Mr Darcy Takes A Wife MUCH MUCH more.

After reading the first 50 pages I began skimming through this awful excuse of a book.
The book is so poorly written that the train of thought is difficult to follow. I had to re-read sentences three times just to try to understand what the author was trying to get at. I could not follow her train of thought even with careful attention.
I only bothered to finish skimming the book to see if there were any redeeming qualities in the plot. Answer: Don't bother.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single book in possession of a good sales history must be in want of a sequel. This book, however, is not that sequel.

"An Unequal Marriage" begins almost twenty years after the events in "Pride and Prejudice". Mr. and Mrs. Darcy enjoy an impossibly perfect marriage full of perfect love, perfect gentility, and perfect beauty. Their daughter Miranda is a perfect delight, their son Edward - well, he's young, headstrong, foolish, and (worst of all) short. But everything else is utterly perfect, to the point that even old Lady Catherine gives her grudging approval to Elizabeth's impeccable reign as mistress of Pemberley. But this unrealistically idyllic life collapses in the wink of an eye - or so it seems - after Darcy and Elizabeth have words over their son's descent into folly. The entire edifice, all twenty years of married super-ultra-bliss, is destroyed in an instant: Elizabeth runs away, suddenly turning into a strident, raving pseudo-feminist who endlessly whines and complains to herself about the inequities of the time while she's on the run from the eeeevil, inferior Mr. Darcy. Three pages before the end, though, deus ex Bingley suddenly clears up the Big Misunderstanding and saves the day and everything is instantly back to normal.

Roger Ebert calls plots like this Idiot Plots, because they only work if every character acts like an idiot. Which is the case here: none of the characters have even the slightest amount of common sense, nor do they have anything in common with Austen's characters other than name. Elizabeth gets the worst of it, becoming an impossibly perfect Mary Sue, at least superficially. Every man is in love with her, every man thinks she's the most beautiful woman in England, every man wants her - and it's all about her physical appearance, which is suddenly the only thing about her that matters to anyone. This character derailment is apparently necessary so that Tennant can create sexual tension between Elizabeth and other men once she runs away from Darcy (because naturally no woman who isn't physically perfect could ever attract a suitor).

By this point I'm wondering if Tennant realizes exactly how misogynistic her book is. Look at the two main threads that run throughout the book: feminism is the domain of crazy, irrational man-haters who are too stupid to understand that their place in life is as a man's playtoy and general submissive servant; and women who are superficially perfect in every way make trouble for their husbands by attracting men - but women who aren't superficially perfect in every way are hideous monsters that no man will ever look at. Does she have the slightest clue of how ridiculous and contradictory these threads are?

She also manages to combine overwrought melodrama with what I suppose she thinks is "gritty realism" - Bingley had a mistress, Mary is dead, the Darcy son is mentally unstable. But this supposed realism only serves to suck any residual Austen charm out of the story. The reader loses interest in the characters and the plot long before Tennant hits the big red Reset Button three pages before the end. (Not to mention that the Darcy son's problem has no relationship to any real-life psychiatric disorder.)

The writing, and especially the clunky dialogue, is also sub-par. In many of Mrs. Bennet's scenes (I'm thinking specifically of a scene early in the book featuring Charlotte Collins and Lady Lucas) the characters seem to be merely bellowing unrelated phrases at each other. It's confusing and annoying and does nothing to advance whatever ragged plot there is.

If you're in the market for a continuation of "Pride and Prejudice", look elsewhere. I so do not recommend this book.