Being Elizabeth Bennet (Emma Campbell Webster)**

Being Elizabeth Bennet gives Jane Austen fans the chance to do the thing they’ve always wanted to do – be one of her heroines – but, like Alexandra Potter’s Me and Mr Darcy, it turns out to be disappointing. Maybe the truth is that Jane Austen is unique, and no-one else can write her novels for her. But six completed novels (if you include Persuasion, which could have done with another rewrite but did tell the full story) from Jane Austen is probably worth six hundred novels from anybody else, so perhaps asking for more than that is just too greedy.

Being Elizabeth Bennet is in the style of a conventional adventure game book. You read a page; get diverted to another page; make choices that determine your success as a young Regency woman in search of a husband. Your choices, as well as the situations that befall you, are rewarded by increases and decreases in your intelligence and fortune points. You are also required to make lists of your Good and Bad Connections, and your Accomplishments and Failings. It’s all quite complicated, but ultimately necessary if you want to know what Campbell-Webster thinks you deserve.

The book mostly sticks with Pride and Prejudice, but there are opportunities for a number of diversions. If you’re lucky, you can become romantically entangled with and, in most cases, receive proposals of marriage, not only from Mr Collins and Mr Darcy, but also Willoughby (Sense and Sensibility), Mr Wickham and Colonel Fitzwilliam (Pride and Prejudice), Henry Crawford (Mansfield Park), Mr Knightley and Robert Martin (Emma), Henry Tilney (Northanger Abbey), Captain Wentworth, ‘Mr Bennet’ (Jane Austen’s Mr Elliott) and Captain Benwick (Persuasion) and Tom Lefroy (a real-life acquaintance of Jane Austen’s). In short, it’s fair to say that Campbell-Webster’s Elizabeth Bennet gets around a bit.

Of course, in order to consider marrying such vastly different gentlemen, it is necessary for Elizabeth to fall at least a little bit in love, which in turn necessitates a number of personality changes. Such strange behaviour can only suggest schizophrenia, or a disturbing tendency to transform herself into the person her companion wants her to be – neither of which seem to affect the real Elizabeth Bennet. Indeed, the very idea that Elizabeth would, as this book suggests, be searching for a husband in the first place rather suggests that Campbell-Webster does not know the character quite as well as she ought to.

Perhaps these difficulties could be overlooked if they were the only problems: after all, this book is just a bit of fun. Or is it? Part of the fun for Campbell-Webster seems to be setting herself up as a kind of conscience figure for Elizabeth, not only telling you what points you have won and lost, but also taunting her unkindly, telling her she’s stupid and unattractive. While Jane Austen is certainly not above poking fun at her characters occasionally, she generally does so with great affection. Austen does go into some detail about Elizabeth’s thoughts, but she still leaves room for the reader’s imagination to see her characters as they wish to. Campbell-Webster seems to despise Elizabeth, and to have more sympathy for the sensibilities of Marianne Dashwood, and it is very difficult to see Elizabeth in any way other than the way Campbell-Webster wants us to see her.

Also, some of the diversions are very easy to avoid if you know the story. The book might have been a bit more fun if Elizabeth had met some of her other men without going to places she doesn’t in Pride and Prejudice. For example, perhaps Mr Darcy could have brought Mr Knightley with him to see Lady Catherine instead of Colonel Fitzwilliam, and then perhaps Captain Wentworth could have been staying in Derbyshire. When Elizabeth is offered a trip to Bath, it is clear to the Austen fan that she will meet Henry Tilney there (which, okay, is a very good reason for going). But why not send Elizabeth to Meryton, give her a choice of going left or right, with one of the options leading her to Wickham, and one to Henry? Something like that. We don’t need to see the diversions coming from miles away.

To be fair to Campbell-Webster, the book was probably more difficult to put together than an original story, and probably not many authors could have done a better job; possibly the only author who could have done so is Jane Austen. And, considering that so many Austen fans will read anything in order to spend a little more time with Austen’s marvellous characters, you can’t really blame Campbell-Webster for wanting to write the book, for either financial or creative reasons. But that still doesn’t mean it’s any good.