With shaking fingers, Bennet unfolded the missive and scanned to the bottom of the second page for a Fitzwilliam Darcy. When Lydia Bennet elopes with George Wickham it seems certain that the fledging second chance at love between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy has been destroyed. Dashing home from her visit to Pemberley, Elizabeth Bennet re-reads Darcy’s letter and regrets what surely can never be, not now. Desperate times often call for desperate measures, as Mr Bennet is soon to discover under the most painful of circumstances. His search for Lydia and Wickham is proving unfruitful and still worse—he has discovered signs of a secret romance between his most sensible second daughter and none other than Mr Darcy. Seeing an opportunity to both avoid ruination and perhaps have some redemption of the family name, Mr Bennet is quick to visit Mr Darcy with a proposed solution. But every solution provides a new set of challenges for Darcy and Elizabeth in this tale of romance lost and found.
Author
Mary Smythe is a homemaker living in South Carolina with a rather useless BA in English collecting dust in a closet somewhere. She discovered the works of Jane Austen as a teenager, thanks to the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries featuring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, and has since gone on to read everything written by Ms Austen at least once yearly, always wishing that there were more. She has been writing since 2001, but only discovered Jane Austen Fanfiction in the summer of 2018. Dare to Refuse Such a Man is the first full-length novel she has ever completed, though she can boast a few shorter works in her library, as well.
