[The Bennet Wardrobe 04] • Lizzy Bennet Meets the Countess

The universe was shaken once again on Midsummer’s Day in 1801. The Bennet Wardrobe’s door to the future was opened in the book room at Longbourn. This time, the most impertinent Bennet of them all, Elizabeth, tumbled through the gateway. Except she left not as the grown women with whom we have become so familiar, but rather as a 10-year-old girl who had been playing a simple game of hide-and-seek.

What/where/when was her destination? What needs could a young girl, only beginning to learn to make her way in the Regency, have that could be answered only by the Wardrobe? Or were the requirements of another Bennet, one who began as younger, but had aged into a beautiful, confident leader of society, the prime movers behind Lizzy’s journey? Is the enigmatic Lady Kate the force that shaped the destiny of Lizzy and her younger sisters left back in Hertfordshire? How do the visions of the future brought home by young Lizzy help shape her world?

Answers to these and other questions raised in the Bennet Wardrobe series can be found in Lizzy Bennet Meets the Countess.

This is a medium-length novella that considers a slice of time between the end of The Exile: Kitty Bennet and the Belle Époque in 1892 (volume two of the Bennet Wardrobe) and the beginning of Henry Fitzwilliam’s War in 1915. After Lizzy is transported back to that bucolic summer day in 1801 proto-industrial Great Britain, Lizzy Bennet Meets the Countess will carry all listeners forward to what may be considered the greatest writers’ workshop in history.

T’was at the legendary Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva that Lord Byron gathered Mary Godwin (Frankenstein), John Polidori (The Vampyre) and Percy Bysshe Shelley for a vacation during the Year Without a Summer. Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth, were there to act as catalysts that would transform vague ideas into timeless speculative fiction.