📖The Secret Diary of Lydia Bennet by Natasha Farrant📖
The Secret Diary of Lydia Bennet by Natasha Farrant is a really cute, probably midgrade epistolary novel, including Lydia's diary entries and letters to and from her sisters and mother. This book is now sold out, so you would have to borrow it from your library, or buy it used from Amazon Marketplace.
It's not a bad little book. It basically retells Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen from Lydia's perspective.
And as I mentioned in this post, a lot of published fanfiction about Lydia tends to have Lydia meet her demise in a very tragic way. I appreciated that this book had a happy ending for Lydia (as did Jane Austen's original novel.)
The only thing I find really unrealistic to Lydia's character is that she would be trying to improve her mind by reading books from the library. I really don't see Lydia having the patience to read anything.
But for posterity, I do want to make note of all the intertextual literary references mentioned in this book.
"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page." Saint Augustine
The Meditations of Saint Augustine is referenced in this book - you can read it online here.
Shakespeare: So just like Disney's Belle, Mary Bennet (and Lydia Bennet) would be familiar with Shakespeare. In The Forgotten Sister, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, The Tempest, Othello, and As You Like It are referenced. In Mary B, Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra are mentioned. In this book, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and the Sonnets are referenced.
John Milton: Paradise Lost
"Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.
Hear and believe! They own importance know...
Alas, poor Yorick!
For hym was levere have at his beddes heed
Twenty books, clad in blak or reed..."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."
Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian
I also did want to give a shoutout to Mary Bennet. I just like her a lot and I don't know why.
Thursday 5th September 1811
Mary went to the library to get some books. (page 9)