Reviewed by Emily-Jane Hills Orford for Readers' Favorite

Mr. Bennet, Elizabeth’s father, has been taken ill. Her mother is distraught and her sisters beg her to return to Longbourn to help care for both parents. Her husband, the very handsome Mr. Darcy, agrees that she should go and, as he points out, he must go away to London for a few weeks anyway. Elizabeth returns to her childhood home and is distressed to find both parents bedridden, one from a serious illness and the other from stress. So much has changed and yet so much remains the same as Elizabeth reconnects with her sisters and meets the fabulously handsome new doctor who visits daily to tend to Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. Meanwhile, Mr. Darcy in London is rumoured to be showing considerable attention to another woman, a single woman.

Margaret Lynette Sharp’s novel, Longbourn Revisited, is a charming continuation of Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice. Keeping in character with Austen’s writing style, Margaret has created a short vignette of what Elizabeth’s life might be like after her marriage to Mr. Darcy. Austen fans are sure to love this story. There is considerably more dialogue and fewer descriptive passages than one would find in Austen’s novels, but the atmosphere, the setting and the story line itself are very much in keeping with Austen’s style. Austen, using a narrative technique, fully disclosed the nature of all of the characters, so Margaret’s story needed little description, if any, to set the stage, as all Austen fans would already know all there was to know about setting and characterization. A pleasant romp in the eighteenth-century world of Austen and her characters.