Carol Makkyla

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Time is very important for Jane Austen, and she delineates it very carefully in Pride and Prejudice.  The book spans the first year in the relationship between Darcy and Elizabeth, beginning with their introduction at a dance in Meryton in the early fall, and ending with their marriage a year later, likely in November.  My book essentially spans the second year of Darcy and Elizabeth’s life together, beginning with the events surrounding their engagement, continuing on for another year until the birth of the couple’s first child, and ending with the surprise visit of Lady Catherine, who arrives at Pemberley unannounced to see the baby.  There is a brief epilogue dealing with events beyond that time frame, describing the ultimate fates of of the main characters.

While my novel may not be exactly the sequel to Pride and Prejudice that Jane Austen might have written herself, I do believe that she would give it her seal of approval, for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, it is a “true” sequel to her book.  The dictionary definition of a sequel is a book that picks up where the original left off, using the same plot and characters as the basis for the new book.  There are a number of Pride and Prejudice sequels out there.  They keep popping up like mushrooms in the forest after a spring rain, and some of them may be wonderful books, but I suspect that most go off in their very own direction, and that very few actually meet the criteria of a real sequel.  My novel does just that.

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Carol Makkyla - Author

A love of languages.  All of my grandparents were immigrants, my father’s family having come from Finland and my mother’s from Poland.  While my parents were determined that we children would grow up speaking English, that did not prevent us from overhearing conversations carried on in other languages from a very early age.  Those conversations represented a mysterious world for me, one that I found myself locked out of, and unable to enter, and I was fascinated.

It was this fascination with foreign languages that made me decide to major in French as an undergraduate at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.  There was such a thing in place as the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) which encouraged students to major in foreign languages.  The NDEA paid for my summer school at Tufts University in Boston in 1965, as well as for a trip to France in the summer of 1971, when I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota.

But then, just as I was finishing my coursework and getting ready to send out my résumés, the bottom dropped out of the job market for us foreign language majors.  The U.S. government suddenly decided that foreign language learning was no longer important and ceased to fund the NDEA.  Secondary and higher education institutions soon followed suit, cutting back on, or cancelling, their foreign language programs, and we foreign language majors found out that we had just been trained for jobs that no longer existed.

A Civil Service career?  What was I to do?  I had to earn a living for myself somehow, and since Starbucks had not been invented yet, I decided to join the University of Minnesota Civil Service, and that is where I spent most of the remainder of my working life.  There are those who would fault me for this, for abandoning my dreams, but dreams do not buy groceries or pay the rent.

Looking back, I am generally satisfied with my decision to join the Civil Service at the University.  Working there was a little like working at the United Nations, and I was able to meet and form friendships with people from all over the world.  And while I was not doing what I was trained to do—namely, teach French—I was still involved in education in some way.

I never did get back to Europe, but I was able to take extended vacations during the summer, driving out west with my dogs.  I never married or had children, but there were always dogs, one Pekingese, one Scottish Terrier, and five Lhasa Apsos, in succession over the years.  I know and understand dogs, and that is why dogs play such a prominent role in the novel that I have just written.

BOOKS

Title TBA (2026)
ISBN: 978-1-952567-xx-x (softcover)
ISBN: 978-1-952567-xx-x (hardcover)

Plot, Characters & Highlights

Plot.  My novel picks up the action shortly before the original novel ends, backtracking a little to include the banquet scene that inspired me to write, the preparations for the wedding, and the wedding itself.  It goes on to depict Darcy and Elizabeth’s trip north to Pemberley in late autumn, under the harsh conditions of the Little Ice Age in Britain.  The couple make several important life-changing stops along the way, and once they arrive at their destination, time spins faster and faster for them, as they encounter new difficulties, and their household begins filling up with guests arriving for the Christmas holidays.  Things gradually wind down for the Darcys after the New Year and Twelfth Night, but one important issue is not resolved until the very last paragraphs of the main body of my novel.  (Don’t peek ahead!)

Characters.  While Darcy and Elizabeth give Pride and Prejudice its center, they are buoyed up by a large supporting cast of characters whom I largely retain and let stand as Austen created them.  Who would want to cast aside such wonderful comic creations as Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, the buffoon Mr. Collins, and the gossiping Lucases?  Then there are the other lesser characters who give us food for thought:  Bingley, who has so little self-confidence that he can be manipulated into abandoning Jane, the woman he loves, by his friend Darcy; Jane herself, a hopeless Pollyanna who refuses to see evil anywhere in the world; and finally, Wickham and Lydia, he the inveterate gambler and con man, and she his naive and underage victim.  I extend the lives of all of these wonderful supporting characters in my novel, but doubt that they reappear in many other Pride and Prejudice sequels.

Darcy and Elizabeth themselves do undergo one important change in my novel, in that he becomes the stronger character and takes the lead in most instances.  Darcy demonstrates that he can be a force to be reckoned with in own Austen’s book when he hunts down Wickham and basically bribes/forces him to marry Lydia.  I see Darcy moving even further in that direction once he gains more self-confidence after securing Elizabeth for himself.

To any of the ladies among the potential readers of my sequel who might be disappointed by this development, I can only say that I am sorry, but this was bound to happen, and that Austen herself prepares us for this turn of events when Elizabeth finally concludes that Darcy may be the right man for her because he is older and more experienced, better educated, and knows more, and that she could learn from him.

Don’t get me wrong!  Elizabeth remains a strong character who is still capable of holding her own, and she does so in more than one important instance, but she is now more of a team player.  That could be said of Darcy also.  Marriage changes both of them in this way, turning them into team players.

I expand the roles of two of Austen’s secondary characters considerably. 

Darcy’s cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam plays only a brief and perfunctory role in Austen’s novel, where he is introduced mainly to confirm Elizabeth’s suspicions that it was his cousin Darcy who broke up the romance between her sister Jane and his friend Bingley.  In my sequel, Fitzwilliam and Darcy are more like brothers who have a great deal of affection for one another, but still have their spats.  The more brash Fitzwilliam often plays the comedian, acting as a foil to the far more serious Darcy, and he especially likes to tease Kitty.

Whereas Elizabeth’s younger sister Kitty is described as “insipid” in Austen’s novel and we are told that she only joins her sister at Pemberley later on, I transform Kitty into a more assertive character who accompanies the wedding party on their trip from Hertfordshire up into Derbyshire.  Kitty is the “coming of age” character of my novel who begins to blossom as soon as she leaves Longbourn behind her.

I add some memorable characters of my own to the mix.

Several of Darcy’s family members are among them, his cousin Charlie and his eighty-something Uncle Henry, who befriends the young couple at their wedding and invites them to stop at his estate on their way north.   “Befriends?” you say.  “Didn’t Lady Catherine warn Elizabeth that she would be shunned by Darcy’s family, were she to marry him?”  And I answer, “Yes, Lady Catherine did say that, but do Jane Austen’s characters necessarily tell the truth when they describe themselves and the other people in her novels?  Think ‘George Wickham and Mr. Darcy!’  Wickham described himself as the poor innocent victim of the cruel and wicked Mr. Darcy, which proved to be not at all the case.  Now you get it!  Perhaps Lady Catherine was lying or deceiving herself about her family’s reaction to a possible Darcy-Elizabeth match.

In addition to beginning my novel where Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice left off, and incorporating her characters into my work, my novel qualifies as a sequel to hers in yet another way:  I was able to successfully adopt Jane Austen’s style of writing.

—Like Austen, I use an omniscient narrator and extensive dialogue to tell my story.

—With the exception of a few brief flashbacks, time moves forward in a straight line in my novel, just as it does in Austen’s;  i.e., time does not skip around, jumping back and forth between the present, the past, and the future, as is often the case in so many modern novels.

—Like Jane Austen, I repeatedly use letters (and in one case, the newspaper) to advance the action.

—Like Jane Austen’s original, my spinoff contains a number of unexpected reversals, surprises, and twists and turns, all created using Austen’s own methods.

—While there are a few “bumps in the road” in my novel, it is above all a comedy, like Jane Austen’s original.  I use every device that comes to mind to keep my readers laughing, from farce (“Mrs. Adkins is choking on her potato”), to monomania (cousin Charlie and his dogs), to sophisticated double entendre (Mr. Collins and Wickham).  I believe that what the world really needs now is cause for laughter.

This should give you some idea of what my novel is like, although I have barely touched the surface here.  You will have to read my book to find out more.

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in 2026

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THE GENESIS OF MY NOVEL:

I had studied literature extensively as part of my foreign language program while in college, but had to give that up once I entered the workforce and became too busy scrambling to earn a living to give much thought to such things.  I really did not begin reading again until after my retirement, picking up a book here and there.  Then, several years ago, I noticed my copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice lying on a shelf where it had been gathering dust, and decided that it was time to read that book.  To tell the truth, I was not expecting very much.  I was aware of all the hoopla surrounding Austen, but attributed that to just another fad, not to any real excellence on her part as a writer.  All of that changed once I opened up that book and began to read.  I found myself “hooked.”

The famous love story between Darcy and Elizabeth played a role, of course, but there is a lot more to Pride and Prejudice than that love story.  With my background in literature, what really caught my attention at first was the curious structure of Austen’s book.  Up until about the middle of the novel, the reader is led to see things mostly through Elizabeth’s eyes, with George Wickham a poor, persecuted Romantic hero, and the inscrutable Mr. Darcy a villain.  Then, the terrible Mr. Darcy, in a totally unexpected move, proposes marriage to Elizabeth, and an explosive scene unfolds between them.  Following his abortive marriage proposal, Darcy hands Elizabeth a letter in which she learns that George Wickham is the real villain of the piece and that she has been guilty of a serious error in judgement.

Trained as a literary critic, albeit many years ago, my first reaction was:  “What has happened here?  Does Austen prepare the reader for this unexpected and shocking reversal, and what purpose does it serve in her novel?”  I wondered if she was using the reversal to demonstrate that appearances can be deceiving, a reoccurring theme in her work.  I was beginning to understand that the deeper one goes into Pride and Prejudice, the more one is likely to come up with questions rather than answers.

I kept mulling Austen’s novel over in my head, and then I suddenly realized that it wasn’t quite finished yet.  Austen usually exploited every possible source of comedy in her novels, but I found that she had neglected a major one at the very end of Pride and Prejudice.  There, she shows us how the very gossipy people of the good town of Meryton go into conniptions over Lydia’s elopement and subsequent marriage to Wickham, and are a short while later bowled over by Jane’s engagement to Bingley, yet she says not a word about what their reaction must have been to Elizabeth’s sudden—and totally unexpected—engagement to Darcy.  The good townspeople of Meryton were only aware that Mr. Darcy had described Elizabeth as not being handsome enough to even dance with, and that she had found him despicable, so the announcement of their engagement must have surely sent shock waves throughout the entire community, but Austen has nothing to say about that, probably because her focus as a writer had moved elsewhere by this point in time.

Seeing the opportunity for mayhem presented by this earthshaking news, the imagination of this reader soon caught fire, however, and a movie began running through my head.  I could see Mr. Bennet announcing Darcy and Elizabeth’s engagement to his neighbors at one of those big dinner parties that his family seemed to always be holding for the good people of Meryton, with hilarious results as his audience begins to digest this bit of news.  Next thing I knew, I was writing down the drama that was playing out in my head, both for my own entertainment and that of a friend and neighbor who is a big Pride and Prejudice fan.  Once I began writing, I found I was having so much fun that I could not stop, and ended up completing my first novel (and my first work of fiction) at the tender age of 80.

So, what can an eighty year old mind produce?  You will have to read my book to really find out…