New Today: Mr. Darcy’s Dream by Elizabeth Aston

One of the most amazing things about Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is how, almost 200 years after the death of the author, her characters continue to inspire others to enter her world, sometimes in the most public of ways.

Some of the fanfic inspired by Austen’s work is the very worst of fanfic of any kind: weak little pastiches that barely captures the flavor of Austen’s work, let alone the comforting majesty.

And then there’s Elizabeth Aston. With Mr. Darcy’s Dream (Touchstone Fireside) she’s six novels into an internationally acclaimed series inspired by characters who first breathed in Jane Austen’s most famous work.

Aston describes herself as a “passionate Jane Austen fan” who also happened to have studied at Oxford with Austen biographer Lord David Cecil. But Aston is more than a studied fan: she’s also personally talented and assured, as a growing readership for her series will attest.

In Mr. Darcy’s Dream, Darcy’s niece Phoebe has returned to Pemberley after a failed romance... only to hook up with her uncle’s brilliant landscape designer.

Eighteenth century chicklit... Regency style, but man: this stuff has legs.