Book review: Dancing with Mr. Darcy

The third book I read in 2015 is Dancing with Mr. Darcy, a collection of short stories entered in a Jane Austen short story competition, introduced by Sarah Waters.  I might have enjoyed the stories more if I'd spaced them out with other reading material in between rather than pushing straight through from the first page to the last.  My tolerance for short stories is low in the best of circumstances; the passing glimpses of characters one gets in the abbreviated art form is like watching train cars pass by: both interminable and ephemeral.

The quality of the stories meanders the gamut (really, it's a bunch of introspective female characters examining their lives; there's not enough action for them to "run") from high-school-literary-magazine to Austen-sequel-doomed-to-end-its-days-remaindered (Elinor Dashwood Ferrars opening her own private detective agency à la Precious Ramotswe, really?).  My favorites are "Eight Years Later" by Elaine Grotefield, which is daring enough to have a male protagonist, and "One Character In Search of Her Love Story Role" by Felicity Cowie, although I'm a bit dubious of the author for not acknowledging the debt she owes to Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series.  (Barely possible she's never heard of it and just invented the same conceit, but it would be an absolutely astonishing case of parallel development.)

{Fun Fact to Know and Tell: I went to dictionary.com to copy paste the correctly accented a in "à la"  rather than having to find it in the character map and discovered that, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the phrase's first published use with an English rather than a French word as the object was in Jane Austen!}