The school of authors writing Austenesque fiction has grown exponentially since its early days in the mid-2010s. Before that, the tales tended to be retellings of Jane Austen’s original Pride and Prejudice. Heaven forbid an author attempted any tale based upon any of the other novels, and do not even think of composing a story that is not about Darcy and Elizabeth. Oh, and the work must remain in the Regency period, none of that modern stuff!
Eventually, though, writers began to question if sticking to the plot laid down by Austen was inhibiting their creativity. Our forebears are those who answered yes. After a point, I suspect, their authorial genes began to flex their muscles. While their stories remained based in Canon, they began to use Elizabeth and Darcy, Jane and Bingley, the other sisters, and the Bennet parents in stories that began with Pride and Prejudice but ultimately explored new arenas. These giants broke the trail —Abigail Reynolds, Regina Jeffers, and Joy King, to name a few—for those of us who came afterward. I believe Abigail was the one who coined “A Pride and Prejudice Variation,” although I may be mistaken.
We are fortunate enough in the 2020s to have expanded our genre to the point where dragons and magic can exist, Mary can be a spy or a detective, and Elizabeth can be friends with Anne Elliot.
For my part, I do not disappear inconvenient characters. If they are not useful to the story, I will allow that they exist (After all, Austen took the time to write them), but that’s about all. In some cases (as in Ghost Flight for Caroline Bingley, Collins, and Lady Catherine), their reality is alluded to in dialog or explanatory text. I had fun putting a Special Operations Executive training camp at Rosings. Elizabeth is ‘Madeline,’ and Eileen Nearne is ‘Rose.’
STS-64, Rosings, February 29, 1944
Rose and Madeline arrived in Denden’s office, the manor’s old library. As the two women entered a room they had never seen, Lizzy saw a monstrosity of a chair—a throne—lurking in the shadows. She looked at their chief instructor and sent one eyebrow arching toward her hairline.
Rake followed her pointed glance. “Ah, yes, that: according to local lore, there once was a delusional woman, a commoner who styled herself a noble, who set herself on that thing to lord—or is it lady?—herself over those who came to beg her beneficence. Turns out, darlings, that bad taste and bad furniture are eternal. If it did not tickle my peacock sense, I’d have had it dragged out onto the firing range to allow your lot a chance to play that buckskin-clad Davy Crockett.”
Mr. Collins receives a note in reference to someone being “like a vicar bowing and scraping to his patroness.”
Elizabeth’s sisters and parents do not appear in Ghost Flight. However, for me to understand the Elizabeth Bennet I was creating, I had to build biographies for all these people. I hope readers will enjoy reading the Appendix which offers sketches of these fascinating people.
Victoria Kincaid, a publishing contemporary of mine with her first Variation releasing around the same time as mine in 2014-15, helped define my term, first made in 2017. Victoria asserts that Austenesque fiction draws inspiration from Jane Austen’s characters and work, using them as the foundation for a new creative endeavor. Austenesque authors build on Austen, not mimic her.
However, if Austenesque authors resolve not to imitate Austen, then how do they find a way through the thicket of expectations and tropes that have been used a thousand times?
I often find myself using the ‘What If’ or ‘How’ technique.
How might Elizabeth’s younger sisters and parents have changed after the double wedding at the end of Pride and Prejudice? I found it difficult to accept that the life-changing marriages for Jane and Elizabeth did not bring any alterations for the remaining Bennets—yes, I know Lydia was a Wickham!
Thus began my musings that led to the books of the Bennet Wardrobe Series, where I considered how Mary, Kitty, Lydia, and the Bennet Parents changed when they learned what they needed thanks to the Wardrobe.
Elizabeth is invisible from the second page in Volume One (Mary’s book) to the opening of Volume Eight, The Grail: The Saving of Elizabeth Darcy. When I released Volume One in 2016, a story about Mary Bennet was just this side of publishing poison. Yet, by the time The Grail appeared in 2022, folks began to understand the need to establish the secondary characters so they could accomplish the final goal—the saving of the love between Darcy and Elizabeth.
What if Darcy and Elizabeth were as socially conscious as most intelligent Britons were in 1807? What role would they have played in the Parliamentary effort to abolish the slave trade? I found it difficult to accept that Darcy and Elizabeth (and, for that matter, Thomas Bennet) were indifferent to Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce’s efforts. This belief served as the underpinnings for In Westminster’s Halls.
In previous days, JAFF authors were hesitant to tackle social questions, fearing they were too controversial for readers (although I have never understood how the abolition of the trade in human souls could be seen as controversial). Today, Austenesque authors examine slavery, social and economic standing, and industrialization as very real aspects of the world in which Jane Austen and her novels existed.
And most recently:
What if Darcy and Elizabeth lived in World War II, rather than the Regency? Answering that question allowed me to consider how the two might have done their bit as Britons in the millions did from 1939 to 1945.
Darcy logically fit the mold as an RAF pilot. I could not make him the ideal size for a Spitfire, but some tall men crammed themselves into the confined cockpit. Thus, Darcy did fight in the Battle of Britain and earned a DSO and two DFCs. Later, he volunteered to fly Ghost Flights (along with Bingley) and drop supplies to the Resistance.
Elizabeth followed Jane into the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) to work at Bentley Prior’s great map table as Air Vice Marshal Park sent the fighters up to harry the Nazi bombers. Later, she worked as a radio operator and supervisor at RAF-Holme, guiding home Ghost Flights.
Then, both end up in the Special Operations Executive and are sent to France, where they meet face-to-face for the first time. Yes...there is a crumb there. See the excerpt at the end.
One last served as the basis for this year’s short story, The Last Gift. What if Jane Austen’s death in July 1817 was not the end, but only the beginning?
The question “What If” is at the root of every story I write. I wonder what will be my next What If (Hint—I already know.)?
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Ghost Flight: A World War II Pride and Prejudice Variation publishes on June 30, 2025 and is available on all Amazon sites worldwide. Here’s the book description:
Darkness Dims the Dawn
War’s clouds have choked the world for five years. Now, the Allies ready their great push to drive Hitler back to Berlin.
WAAF Section Officer Elizabeth Bennet and RAF Wing Commander Fitzwilliam Darcy have already done their bit. Both bear scars—seen and unseen—from their service. They have done much; now they will do more.
Elizabeth and Darcy step forward to undertake the deadliest of tasks: gathering intelligence behind German lines. They go knowing that the Gestapo’s destiny for captured Special Operations Executive agents was simple: a bullet.
World War II’s road to romance was bumpy. Cultivating affection’s fragile bloom while looking over their shoulders, Darcy and Elizabeth discover what is universal: the most ardent of loves.
Explore the dark, gritty world of Occupied France in 1944 at the shoulders of Fitzwilliam Darcy, SOE Agent Jeeves, and his radio operator, Elizabeth Bennet, Agent Madeline. This is a full-length novel of 115,000 words that asks how Darcy and Elizabeth might have served if they had been part of the Greatest Generation.
US Link Ghost Flight US Amazon
UK Link Ghost Flight UK Amazon Link
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Ghost Flight: A World War II Pride and Prejudice Variation is ©2025 by Donald P. Jacobson. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this excerpt, either whole or in part, is prohibited. Published in the United States of America.
Prologue
October 21, 1943
The chimes broke through the haze through which he wandered. Misty shudders signaled each peal until, eventually, nine had sounded. Otherwise, silence ruled the world, the tinkling notes rendered moot by carpet and quilt.
He tried to open his eyes but could barely lift the lid on the right because the left refused to respond. As light invaded, so did pain: not the low-level ache of being battered on the rugger pitch, but a full-body agony after being thrown by a mount refusing a hedge when riding to the hounds. Even with eyes clamped shut, there was no escaping the reddish cloud surrounding him.
His groan brought an immediate response. “Sir? Sir? Please don’t struggle. You are trussed up like a Christmas goose, but even so, the less you move, the less your pain.”
His mouth worked. “Blinding. Not ready. Please...”
The nurse was quick at her job. “Doctor left instructions for morphine to ease your burden. I’ll be adding it to your drip.
“Your cousin visited before you woke. He left a message that you should rest and recover as quickly as possible. He will call you to take up the cause in early Spring.”
Metal and glass clattered. His caregiver’s humming of a familiar tune was the soundtrack of a featureless film that gradually faded as the drug wrapped him in its numbing arms.
***
A lotus-eater’s dream
A forest of rattling leaves surrounded him as shards of the Dakota’s skin peeled away, torn by the Nazi night fighter’s sausage-sized rounds. Their only bit of luck outside of bad had been that the Me Bf109G must have been low on fuel and broke off its attack after the one devastating pass, confident that the destruction decided the issue.
The North Sea called to his nightshade beast. Weary muscles struggled with the controls to fight the siren’s song. Neither Pratt & Whitney engine sounded healthy, although he felt that the left one had enough life to keep them above the choppy waves so the aircrew could bale out—well, the two who could. He prayed they were high enough to allow parachutes to open. If not, death on impact would be a mercy. November’s frigid waters would kill in under twenty minutes. True, they had life rafts—if they inflated and if the air-sea rescue boys could find two small dots amidst bands of rain, sleet, and snow—but the odds of surviving soaked in near or below-freezing temperatures were just barely this side of zero.[i]
His left eye was useless. He dared not release the yoke to probe his wounds, how fragments of the Perspex windshield had ground into his face. Blood rivulets on his neck, frozen in the gale filling the flight deck, told him everything he cared to know.
Bingley sagged against his harness in the cockpit’s right-hand seat. His head lolled side-to-side as the aircraft tried to turn turtle while Darcy fought to keep the left wing down, and the nose pointed toward RAF Holme deep in the East Riding. The co-pilot's fur-lined flying suit bore alarming stains. His friend was still alive; that is what Foote had told Darcy when he crawled forward to cinch tight Bingley’s belts as the transport bucked around the sky. Whether he would survive what was to come was an open question.
Although a man of few words, the corporal was Shakespearean in his objections to his captain’s insistence that he and Sergeant Wilson take to their brollies before the American-supplied airplane augured in. He had stanched the worst of Bingley’s bleeding with battle dressings but did not give the insensible lieutenant a shot of morphine.
Foote then pottered around, bandaging Darcy’s injuries until the pilot snapped as the right engine belched flame and gave up the ghost, ‘This is not the Oxford Union. This is MY aircraft. I have given you an order, not a suggestion. I’ll not have you taking a Burton because you’re too stubborn for your own good! Pull the fire extinguisher lever for Number One. Then you and Wilson take to your parachutes.’
Dawn’s twilight had limned land’s dark smudge rising in the West, providing the first hopeful sign since the attack. Jerry’s attack as they cruised home from a routine Norwegian supply drop changed an earlier-than-expected ETA into a guaranteed crash. Darcy fought to milk every knot from the remaining engine to keep the wounded bird from a fatal stall. Every minute he succeeded was two miles further away from drowning.
Darcy grunted at Foote as he wrestled with the control column. ‘...Aiming for the Humber’s estuary. You’ll have a good chance between the Navy and fishermen—plenty of boats about.
‘...No idea our altitude. Jerry’s pass did for the instruments. Maybe Angels one if we’re lucky. Use your judgment when to go. You two know what four hundred feet look like. Anything less, and you’ll end up like strawberry preserves on your Aunt Margaret's scone.
‘I’ll try to get the kite feet dry before I ditch; otherwise, Bingley and I are for the fishes. Glad we're coming into the North. Less of a...challenge.’ He fought the plane’s wish to drag its right wing like a quail hen protecting her nest.
‘I wouldn’t like to try clearing the White Cliffs: eighty meters if they’re an inch. Of course, the South Foreland guns would have thought we were a Stuka trying to sneak in. Our ack-ack crews miss more often than not, but I would not want to tempt Fate.’
Foote bowed to Darcy’s authority, pulled the pilot’s harness tight, twisted the volume knob on the radio, and crawled back into the fuselage.
***
The static cleared as a powerful carrier signal matched frequency.
A voice snapped in his ears. ‘Ghost One, this is Control. Acknowledge Ghost One.’
He hadn’t noticed his gloves were slick. Not daring to shift his grip, Darcy carefully pushed the button mounted on the wheel. ‘Ghost.’
One word: that’s all he could manage. But ’twas enough.
‘Ghost One. Switch to frequency Charlie-Ace.’ Her perfect diction calmed Darcy.
Flippancy was not his norm, but since he had reconciled himself to death, he resorted to upper-crust humor. ‘Sorry, Control. Cannot comply. Bit of a sticky wicket up here right now. The Hun bounced us and batted a six. ’
The Dakota shivered under his hands. Control, a cool-sounding woman, unflappable she was, came back. ‘So sorry, Ghost. It sounds like he didn’t put your side out. What is your situation?’
‘One stump and one ball gone.’ Darcy hoped Control, one of Harris’s doughty schoolmistress WAAFs, understood what he meant. No sense in giving the enemy any more gen than necessary. ‘Jerry was playing for keeps. Thought he had us bowled out.’
Did he detect a softening of her voice? ‘So not a beer match, then. Can you advise your team’s status?’
The wind shifted as he slid between the headlands guarding the river’s broad mouth. The plane’s nose lifted, putting more air under its belly. He heard the cargo door slam against the fuselage. That meant the two NCOs—more valuable to the SOE than an aircraft chauffeur—sniffed out that it was time to go.
Darcy carefully pointed Georgie—although no white paint proclaiming his sister’s name marred the aircraft’s matte black exterior—toward one of the picket destroyers, on watch for a U-boat trying to sneak up on freight coming out from Hull. The ship was one of fifty ancient four-stackers from the First World War sent by the Americans under Lend-Lease.
He hoped its pom-pom gunners were up to date on aircraft identification. ‘Control: advise Coastal Command that my noncoms baled out near one of their ships on Humber patrol.’
He paused to push the aircraft toward the river’s north shore, dotted by farm fields and primarily low-lying and flat. He pressed the push-to-talk button again. “Control: two wounded souls aboard. Will try to pancake somewhere south of Withernsea.
‘The good news is we’re near bingo fuel, so no fire. That’s also the bad news. The kite looks like it came from a Zurich cheesemonger. Probably will make a poor glider.’
For the first time, Control’s voice shook. Apparently, she had little experience with men about to die. ‘Ghost...’
Darcy summoned every ounce of command he could, digging deep to hear his father’s voice. “Control: no time now to be missish! These are not last words or anything like that!
‘I know I am transmitting au clair, but I may not be able to wait to see Preacher. He needs to hear this at once.
‘We were compromised. The enemy knew we were coming. I bet they picked us up on the outbound leg to see where we went. Not too difficult. Georgie’s blind spot is anything aft of the hatch. Fat Hermann’s boys could have set up shop back there, and we’d never have known it.
‘They scoped where we made our drop. Best to check with our friends on skis to see if Fritz rousted their pickup.
‘No, Control, everything was too convenient given we spent the better part of four hours wave-hopping. Chancing on a single camouflaged Dakota flying low from no place to nowhere would be remarkable. A transport is not the type of trade Jerry looks for when plenty of Lancs and Wellingtons wait to fill his sights.
‘No, we were a special op, and someone on our side peached.’
Her voice rang in his headphones. ‘Are you saying we’ve been penetrated?’
Darcy scanned the brightening terrain now flashing beneath the aircraft’s nose. ‘Yes.’
‘Back to one-word replies, are we, Ghost?’ Her voice sparkled with impertinence.
Darcy exhaled, exhilarated. ‘Things are a bit busy up here, Control.
‘If I prang the crate, I wanted to be sure someone knew my suspicions.’
Field and forest rolled monotonously brown to green and back again. Soon, they blurred. His head bobbed dangerously. Control’s honeyed alto broke in. ‘Captain, wake up! Wake up! Don’t drift off! You must stay awake!’
He shook his head to clear the cobwebs and instantly regretted it as bells clanged behind his eyes. ‘Sorry, Control: it’s been a long night. Thought I’d slip off to Nod for a quick wink. Or I am still dreaming as I keep hearing angels.
‘Oh, wait, that’s Bingley, always going on about this angel or that.’
‘Bingley? Angels? I am too young to be part of the heavenly host.’ Control sounded as though she smiled through the words.
Darcy imagined he heard sucking from the fuel tank—imagined was the critical item—and lined the plane up on a length of fallow field, rich brown from the morning rain. Talking with Control helped him feel less alone. ‘My first officer always talks about his angels, erm, ladies.
‘You don’t sound like one of his: tall and blonde.’
‘That would be my sister, Jane.’
‘I imagine you look stunning in your WAAF service dress, but you sound darker, an alto.’
Darcy tried to picture Control. Although he knew regulations would have forbidden it, he saw brunette curls hanging around her face as she leaned toward the microphone. Dancing brown eyes focused on the grille as if she could see him.
His soundscape became narrow and quiet as the remaining engine chuffed and choked on the dregs. Its death meant his was seconds off. ‘What’s your name?’
He hauled back on the yoke, stalling the plane, and twisted the wheel hard to port, forcing the wing toward the dirt. As the tip dug into Yorkshire mud, Fitzwilliam Darcy registered her reply.
‘Elizabeth.’
[i] The Royal Air Force preferred naming aircraft rather than using numerical designations. Thus, the American DC-3 transport became the Dakota.
So glad JAFF authors finally took a chance and let their imaginations fly. I sometimes imagine “what if” scenarios on my way to sleep…often a gateway into an Austenesque-inspired dream.
I very much enjoyed reading the ARC of “Ghost Flight.” What an awesome history lesson and interesting to read something so detailed from the British pov. I have my review all written and am just waiting for release day to post! Thank you for sharing such a wonderful story.