Is Elizabeth Bennet the new Sherlock Holmes? I ask because she has escaped from her original home (in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice) to star in numerous recent novels. Many of these Jane Austen Variations include Mystery and/or Fantasy elements. The contrast between the polite and prosaic settings and the wild magic woven into the new plots can be delicious. I’ve chosen to focus on a Fantasy series by American author Maria Grace. Her Jane Austen’s Dragons (2017-2024) currently runs to 14 volumes and is described by the publishers as Regency Gaslamp Dragon Fantasy. I’m specifically recommending the prequel, A Proper Introduction to Dragons (2018), which was published fourth in the series but comes first chronologically. It is available in all the usual formats from White Soup Press – a name which will resonate with Regency Romance enthusiasts.

The story begins in 1801 at the manor house of Longbourn in the English countryside. It is the home of scholarly Thomas Bennet, an unhappily married man with five young daughters. His rash marriage to a pretty but poorly educated woman has caused him two major problems. Firstly, Mrs Bennet has failed to produce a male heir, so the estate will eventually pass to a nephew, and secondly she is Dragon-Deaf. Mrs Bennet therefore has no idea that her husband’s main role is to act as Keeper to the estate’s Major Dragon, a crotchety Wyvern known as Laird Longbourn. Nor does she know anything about the Blue Order, to which all warm-bloods (humans) who can hear dragons must belong. It is the Blue Order that enforces the Pendragon Accords which have kept the peace between humans and dragons for nearly a thousand years.

It has long been obvious that the Bennets’ second oldest daughter, Elizabeth (Lizzie) is a Dragon-Hearer. Even as a toddler, she could recognize Minor Dragons that Dragon-Deaf people would see as ordinary domestic animals. As she grows up Mr Bennet begins to train Lizzie in dragon-lore so that she can one day join the Blue Order and become an Assistant Dragon Keeper. By the time she is eleven, Lizzie is acting as her father’s secretary, much to the disapproval of Mrs Bennet. Lizzie longs to get to know some dragons but Mr Bennet does not think she is yet old enough to be formally introduced to the estate’s dominant dragon.

On long walks through the Longbourn estate, Lizzie does meet various Minor Dragons such as the tiny Fairy Dragons who live in the trees and she makes a friend in Rumblkins, a tatzelwurm who looks like a cross between a snake and a cat. One day Rumblkins tells Lizzie about an abandoned Fairy Dragon nest. Fearing that the eggs will be eaten by predators, Lizzie rescues them only to be confronted by an angry Major Dragon demanding to know what she is doing in his territory. Lizzie introduces herself to Longbourn and shows no fear of him so he permits her to take the eggs back to the manor house. Mr Bennet agrees to show her how to care for dragon-eggs but insists that homes must be found for the baby dragons elsewhere.

A nobleman on a nearby estate, Baronet Delves, is keen to acquire Fairy Dragon Friends for his Dragon-hearing teenage children. Lizzie is allowed to accompany her father when he takes the eggs to the Delves’ estate. She is supposed to instruct the baronet’s daughters on how to care for baby dragons but soon discovers that these young ladies are much more interested in eligible men than dragons. After a close encounter with a basilisk, Lizzie is present when the Fairy Dragons hatch. One of them, a feisty female called April, insists on choosing Lizzie as her Friend. Using her draconic powers of persuasion, April manages to convince Mrs Bennet that she is just an exotic bird but Lizzie has broken one of the rules of the Blue Order by befriending a dragon before she is a member.

Mr Bennet is told that he must prepare his daughter to be tested by the Blue Order and the consequences of failure will be severe for both of them. Lizzie is apprehensive as they arrive in London for her testing by a committee of men and dragons, especially as she has come to doubt much of the dragon-lore she has read in books published by the Blue Order. Can one determined girl stand up to the dominant males of the Blue Order?

People have been writing sequels to Jane Austen’s novels for quite a long time but the idea of putting Jane Austen characters into completely new stories is relatively recent. The quality of these Jane Austen Variations varies enormously. Many are truly terrible but some are well worth reading whether or not you like Jane Austen’s work. My pick of the literary novels would be Jo Baker’s Longbourn (2013), which retells Pride and Prejudice from the servants’ point of view, and Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister (2020) which creates a new narrative for Lizzie’s intellectual younger sister, Mary. For sequels which incorporate murder-mysteries, I’d recommend Death Comes to Pemberley (2011) by P.D. James and Claudia Gray’s recent Mr Darcy and Miss Tilney Mysteries, which began with The Murder of Mr Wickham (2023). For Fantasy variations, I’ve already written about Ben H. Winters’ hilarious Sense and Sensibility and Sea-Monsters (Fantasy Reads July 2012) and I was tempted to pick Joyce Harmon’s charming Regency Mage series, which began with Mary Bennet and the Bingley Codex (2019). My main reason for choosing to feature Maria Grace’s series is that you don’t need to be a Jane Austen fan to enjoy it.

In the follow-up to A Proper Introduction to Dragons – Pemberley: Mr Darcy’s Dragon (2017) we meet most of the cast of Pride and Prejudice as Darcy arrives in the Longbourn area in search of a stolen dragon’s egg only to clash with a grown-up Lizzie Bennet. Of course it helps if you have some knowledge of these characters (perhaps from watching TV or film versions of the novel) but this isn’t essential. From Volume 5 onwards (The Dragons of Kellynch), Grace introduces a group of characters from Austen’s last completed novel – Persuasion – and re-tells the second-chance love story between gentle intelligent Anne Elliot and the dashing Captain Wentworth. Curiously, this rather serious couple seem to fit unchanged into dragon-adventures but this isn’t so true of Lizzie and Darcy. Once Lizzie becomes the wise and formidable Dragon Sage, there isn’t much occasion for the wit and sparkle of the original novel and the plots only give proud Darcy a supporting role. I found it better to treat Grace’s characters as if they were her own inventions and judge the story accordingly.

So what does A Proper Introduction to Dragons offer to Fantasy readers? Well first of all a brave and loveable heroine with an obstinate streak. Although the series is aimed at adults, I know that I would have adored this particular novel if I had read it during my early teens. Grace writes convincingly from the point of view of an intelligent child who is still ignorant of financial realities and the complexities of adult relationships. Lizzie suffers from her parents playing favourites with their children and dislikes their quarrels without comprehending all the reasons for them. She finds dragons easier to understand because they are uninhibited by the rules of polite society and usually say exactly what they mean. In Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennet isn’t afraid to disagree with both her parents and follow her own moral code and the same is true in A Proper Introduction to Dragons. Throughout the ensuing series Lizzie is a force for positive change as she challenges hierarchies and forges new kinds of relationships with Major and Minor dragons.

Ah, the dragons… Grace’s series is definitely one for dragon connoisseurs. You can even get a Blue Order Dragon Index with a lengthy annotated list of all her Major and Minor Dragons, complete with their physical and mental characteristics. Traditional dragon types are joined by bird, snake and wyrm types. Some can fly, some live on or under the land (moving around through dragon-tunnels) and some are aquatic. Lizzie loves her pretty, blue, jam-eating Fairy Dragon but my favourites are the cat-like tatzelwurms with their curious hopping gait. One of these would be my ideal companion. I don’t say pet because these are intelligent creatures who consider themselves fully equal to those warm-bloods they deign to communicate with. Grace has cleverly combined a piece of traditional dragon-lore with the title of one of Jane Austen’s novels to explain why all these dragons go unnoticed by most humans. The secret is that dragon-speech is imbued with the power of persuasion.

Grace is good on the physical aspects of dragon-keeping – they have a musky smell and itchy scales which need frequent scratching or cleaning – and on the devotion which can build-up between dragons and warm-bloods. However, these are things you can find in other dragon-based Fantasy novels. What stands out in the Jane Austen’s Dragons series is the way in which Grace has created a hierarchical dragon society which mirrors historical conditions in Regency England. Like the British aristocracy, the Major Dragons are predators who dominate society and control most of its wealth. The Minor Dragons, like most women and working people at this period, have little power and can be preyed on the by ruling class, who regard them as mentally inferior. This is illustrated in A Proper Introduction to Dragons by the Blue Order’s patronising attitude towards the mainly female Fairy Dragons who are regarded as feather-brained creatures only fit to be decorative pets.

In the course of the series, Lizzie makes it her mission to observe and understand dragons of all kinds and to fight for the recognition of the intelligence and rights of the Minor Dragons. She has to learn the complex etiquette of aristocratic and dragon society in order to be taken seriously but also when to trust her own judgement. Even as a child, Lizzie realizes that there are occasions when she must take the dominant role and this earns her respect from most dragons. Helped by a background in Educational Psychology, Dr Grace has written a convincing story about beings from different cultural backgrounds coming together and learning from each other. So, whether you come for the dragons or for the further adventures of Miss Elizabeth Bennet, A Proper Introduction to Dragons is well worth trying. Until next month…

Geraldine

September 2024