Charlotte's Story

In the England of Jane Austen, Charlotte Lucas, unhappy with her loquacious and overbearing husband, draws on her wit and daring to tackle the unexpected problems besetting her marriage.
Charlotte Lucas, a character first appearing in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, has made an unfortunate marriage to the loquacious William Collins, reckoning that his tedious conversation is a small price to pay for the prosperous home and family she hopes to gain. However, trouble brews within the first months of marriage, and she is upset and angered by his presumptuous tendency to interfere with her friendships.

To ease the strain of their relationship, Charlotte leaves her husband to visit the fashionable city of Bath with several women companions. The weeks in Bath prove to be a time for self-discovery and freedom, even license. Although the marital frost between Charlotte and William begins to thaw, that tranquility lasts only briefly, for events in Bath have resulted in an unfortunate, even calamitous, consequence.

Charlotte devises a solution to the advantage of all that combines bold connivance and compassionate duplicity. Some would castigate her audacious stratagem, but she believes it justified by the hope of happiness and the wit and courage to seek it.
The perfect book club recommendation!

--Charlotte’s Story adopts Jane Austen’s style of writing, updated for a contemporary audience

--Amplifies some of the minor characters of Pride and Prejudice and develops their own stories

--Occasionally dips into Austen’s text to indicate where the plot of Charlotte’s Story intersects with Pride and Prejudice; such sentences are indicated with shaded text.

--Explores the problems of courtship and marriage that women of rural middle class in England faced, and ruminates on the persistence of similar issues facing us today.

There are a number of ‘sequels’ to Pride and Prejudice on the market, of which the most well-known is probably P.D. James’ mystery, Death Comes to Pemberley. Charlotte’s Story is more of a parallel plot that dips in and out of the events from Austen’s originating novel. In Charlotte's Story, Carolyn Korsmeye explores Charlotte’s clear-sighted realism in contrast to the romance that is so frequently the focus of interest in Austen’s characters.