Squeamish about Sequels

Adam and I went to the bookstore yesterday (a dangerous place for a girl like me) so that Adam could pick up a Philip K. Dick book he'd been wanting. I wandered around looking at books with my brain drooling...if a brain can do such a thing.

As I meandered, I noticed the preponderance of Jane Austen "sequels." Darcy Takes a Wife, Darcy's Story, Darcy and Elizabeth...and on and on and on. In retrospect, it appears there were just Pride and Prejudice sequels which is funny, because if I could wish Jane Austen alive and writing sequels to her books, I'd want a sequel to Sense and Sensibility. Margaret is the best character in that book and I always wondered what happened to her when the book ended.

But I digress.

Adam, in a benevolent mood after receiving his paycheck, offered to buy me one of these books. I adamantly refused and he was shocked (shocked!) that I wouldn't want to read one. To him I guess it would be like finally seeing, in print, what happened to the characters after the original books.

To me, it would be like finishing an absolutely perfect meal and then joining my cats in their nightly moth hunt. It would leave a bad taste in my mouth. It would just be....wrong.

I will admit that there is one Austen "sequel" I briefly considered reading...and it is not really a sequel but actually the completed version of Sanditon. Austen was writing this novel at the end of her life and, unfortunately, her death precluded her from finishing it.

When I first read Sanditon, I began it knowing that it would not be finished but, somewhere along the way, I forgot that fact. It ends right when the story starts to pick up. It just...ends. I was left feeling bereft and incredibly frustrated. I just wanted to bring her back from the dead so she could finish the book and it irked that I couldn't.

Before reading that book, it was easy for me to forget that Jane Austen was dead. Once I came to that abrupt end, however, it was like being present at the moment of her death even though she died months after writing that last word.

So when I learned that her niece, Anna (or Caroline? Or Catherine?), actually finished the book after Jane's death, I considered reading it. It was tempting because the niece perhaps knew the direction the story was to take.

But Anna (or Caroline. Or Catherine.) is not Jane and so I did not, and will not, read it. And it still bothers me that I will never know the end to that story.

Once we got home from the bookstore, I read through a book of Jane Austen's letters that I've had for years. It is one of those books that I just thumb through from time to time but never actually read from cover to cover. I found a quote from Jane that I was unfamiliar with until last night but I think it applies to this, and all, blogs.

You'll see it under the title of my blog. I think Jane would approve.