The arc of the Bennet Wardrobe is long. Volume One of The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey raises the curtain in 1691. We last saw Mary and her husband Edward Benton in 2013…322 years later. Other principals also have moved about the timeline: Kitty to 1886 while her parents, Thomas and Fanny, translated to 1947. All found what they needed to learn in those futures.
Jane Austen intimated that Lydia Bennet was a larger and more complicated problem. I found the fifth daughter to be just that as I began the process of recreating her life in the Wardrobe’s Universe.
The conundrum of Lydia Bennet, the young lady who loved anything in a red coat (Captain Wentworth was safe from her) was but one of three character problems I faced from the beginning of the Wardrobe Series. The autumn of 2015 saw me beginning to grapple with the interesting futures of Mary, Kitty, and Lydia after the Darcy/Bingley double wedding…and beyond the considerations of Jane Austen. Later, though, Mr. Bennet pushed himself to top-of-mind. The Bennet father, though, could not have been who he was without Mrs. Bennet and, thus, she was added.
Most of what you have been reading began to rise in the early autumn of 2015. I know this because—in preparation for this column—I looked back into my files (are not date and time stamps the most wonderful creation?) for the pictures I dug up to portray Lydia Bennet. You see, I frequently use visual art to help me solidify my thoughts and channel character traits I wish to explore.
Miss Austen left us with the impression that Lydia Wickham would be quite surprised by her life after her dispatch to Newcastle. However, she vanishes from the Canon after her wedding and is only addressed through allusion (the few days spent with Wickham at Longbourn after their London nuptials or that she spilled the fact that Darcy had been at her wedding). Her shenanigans with Wickham had served their purpose and Lydia was moved off-stage.
However, the one solid insight into Lydia’s character readers discover is her simplistic notion of a soldier’s life. Austen beautifully offers us this view into the mind of a fifteen-year-old country girl: balls, parties, and so forth. Of course, her only exposure was to the militia. The regulars were different…and that is where Wickham ends up.
The character feature that I grasped was that Lydia saw the world of the soldier as the epitome of romantic existence, a blindered view at best and tragically two-dimensional at worst. Her limited comprehension was what the Wardrobe needed to change so that it could employ her to its deeper purpose. This Bennet needed to learn about life both in the future and her proximate present. Thus, Lydia’s lesson (much like that of Viscount Henry Fitzwilliam in Henry Fitzwilliam’s War) had to come from the battlefield and from the soldiers who pass through those fraught environments.
Back to 2015.
For some reason, I felt that Lydia would do best in World War II. Not sure why…maybe the Wardrobe and the Old One were nudging me toward inserting her into the Kitty story as the one who is taught by her sister who was going to be the one who led. In any event, by the Fall of 2015, I had settled on a story arc of three books: Mary, Kitty, and Lydia. Deauville had been established as the “new” Longbourn so that my characters were not limited to either Meryton or Pemberley (with quick sojourns in Kent, Grosvenor Square, or Cheapside).
On November 4, 2015, I saved a picture of the Belgian Colonel Jean-Baptiste Piron whose regiment liberated Deauville from the German Army on August 22, 1944 (the liberation of Paris—100 miles to the East—was completed on August 25, 1944. Deauville truly was a non-strategic coastal backwater.).
I saw the young girl bussing the Colonel as Lydia. This seemed like something she would do…or at least something Pride and Prejudice’s Lydia Bennet would do. The problem was that this is exactly what an unreformed Lydia would do. However, by 1944 (and this stage in her life story), Lydia would not have been the flirty and flippant hormonal teenager we first met in 1810. She had been a widow for four years. I will not attempt to explain how time winds in and out within the Wardrobe’s Universe. Suffice to know that George Wickham expired at Waterloo in 1815.
But I really did not have to consider the Lydia question until the turn of 2018/19. Over the next three years, Lydia appeared and passed through The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey, The Exile: Kitty Bennet and the Belle Époque (briefly), and The Exile: The Countess Visits Longbourn. At each stage, readers caught glimpses of this interesting young woman. However, the most recent Bennet Wardrobe book now pulls together the disparate threads into a complete (I hope) tapestry.
As such, I needed a new visual muse. No real big search, but rather casual glances throughout 2017 into 2018.
While writing Volume Six—The Avenger: Thomas Bennet and a Father’s Lament—I found an interesting portrait (Mrs. Luke Ionides). However, the sultry temptress—and a redhead—was not the woman that either the Wardrobe or I imagined. She needed more power…and not sexual…especially as a woman who had finally understood that a soldier’s portion was his wife’s as well.
She needed to have experienced the world and all its joys and sorrows.
She needed to comprehend that life was not a collection of galas, but rather of tiny moments…the cry of a child, that same wee one giggling, the ache of love found and also love lost.
Passing through these veils would create a confident, caring person whose heart led her rather than her libido.
That is when I found Franz Winterhalter’s 1859 painting of Princess Elizabeth Esperovna Belosselsky. This was my Lydia—even if she is wearing a crinoline! Suffice to say that I adopted it immediately and referred to it throughout the six-month process of building the passage of Lydia Bennet through the Wardrobe.
The release of the Meryton Press edition of Volume Seven in the Bennet Wardrobe series is planned for early February. The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion examines the remarkable life of the Fifth Daughter after Elizabeth and Jane are wed. Her mission as determined by the Wardrobe will become clearer as it refines her through the fires of a lengthy life.
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Back Cover copy for The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion
“My life has been very much an unfinished painting. The artist comes to the portrait day after day to splash daubs of color onto bare canvas, filling in the blanks of my story. Thus grows the likeness, imperfect as it may be, which you see today.”
—Lydia Fitzwilliam, Countess of Matlock
Is the fit of a young man’s regimentals important? Miss Austen never considered that query. Yet, this question marks the beginning of an education—and the longest life—in the Bennet Wardrobe saga.
Lydia Bennet, Longbourn’s most wayward daughter, embarks on her quest in The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion. Discover how the Wardrobe helps young Mrs. Wickham learn that honor and bravery grow not from the color of the uniform—or the gender of its wearer—but rather from the contents of the heart.
In the process, Lydia realizes that she must be broken and repaired. Only then can she become the most useful actor in the Bennet Wardrobe’s great drama. The Pilgrim explores questions of love, loss, pain, worry, and perseverance. All of these are brought to bear as one of the silliest girls in England grows into the Dowager Countess of Matlock.
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Coming soon in Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and Print.
Please enjoy the following excerpt which should offer some insight without spoiling the story.
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This excerpt from The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion is ©2019 by Donald P. Jacobson. Any reproduction—either electronic or print—without the expressed written consent of the author is prohibited.
Entr’acte
The Beach House at Deauville, July 1943
’Twas not pain. No, not pain, for the concept of pain implied that such would be an extraordinary circumstance: something outside the realm of normal existence. This agony, this chasm of despair into which she continued to tumble, day-after-day, week-after-week, was not exceptional, but rather the regular currency of her life. Awake or asleep, the lifeblood she poured into the vessel of her soul seeped out between seams rent asunder by ineffable loss.
Lydia Wickham was caught in a netherworld between cherished memories, perhaps delusions, and a reality that worried the edges of her very being like a flint etching tender skin long sheltered beneath a lady of leisure’s satin slippers.
Long days curled up on the library’s sofa gazing at nothing but the great marquetry doors of the Wardrobe merged into equally wakeful nights staring into the featureless plane of matte white that arced above her bower. Alone even when her sister or old Jacques would sit beside her in their own cloud of bereavement, Mrs. Wickham, followed a different but kindred path. As Gaia moved in an elliptical orbit, so, too, did Lydia as she trekked from her chamber to the bookroom and back again. Neither pole exerted a dominant pull over her. She slid through her own private cosmos like a rogue asteroid, unseeing, uncaring, awaiting that inevitable moment when the universe would interpose a greater body that would shatter her into smithereens.
Whether she would re-coalesce into something recognizable remained a question of small concern to her.
A void of indescribable potency yawned in the core of her being. T’was beyond the actual event itself, the fact of which she had come to accept if only to maintain a tenuous grip on sanity. There were so many ancillary losses arising from the original.
Her previous identity, itself expanded from an earlier iteration by the split that began in the time of one Tyrant and ended during the reign of another, had been erased in an instant.
That which she had become was no longer and never again could be.
Then there had been the instinctive camaraderie shared by all women of her situation…and the equally awful revulsion evidenced by those same females the moment they recognized that which had been. Unsure of how to respond, they chose to glance up and away, literally anywhere but into her eyes. Conversations were hushed. Head bobs and shoulder-points cautioned all that a dead woman walked through their midst.
She needed to reset her life but was unable to do so as nothing had yet been resolved. Scenarios played out behind her emerald green eyes. Yet, no clear explanation could ever be understood as she turned the problem over and over in metaphorical hands. No matter what variable Lydia changed, no matter which what if she applied like Herr Einstein twiddling with its building blocks, the Universe, the Old One, always brought her to the same terrifying finish line.
She would die: she would if only to bring surcease from the clawing ennui.
Except that she had not the energy nor, ultimately, the inclination, to destroy herself.
Even in her less-than-half-a-life reality, she comprehended that she was bound by the remarkable energies flowing above, around, and through her.
Her trail was far from over, her curse yet unrelieved, and she despised the Wardrobe that demanded her to be its Galahad.