That night, after dinner, Jonathan would play the violin for them, with Pandora accompanying him on the piano, their instinctive twin awareness of one another leading them to make the same errors at the same moment, so that few in their audience were any the wiser. She would watch her son’s ivory fingers – he possessed the most beautiful hands she had ever seen on a man – as they steered his bow and danced on the neck of his instrument. Pandora might play the sonata with variations Charlotte requested on special occasions, and never heard without happy tears springing to her eyes. Lady Anne would preside, wearing the harem trousers and embroidered silk coat she had brought back from one of her journeys to Persia. And they would close the evening by all turning to her, Charlotte: raising their glasses in a toast to both her, and their late father, of whom they always spoke with affection. And then, as had become their habit, they would drink to the home that welcomed them all: Rosings.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HELEN MOFFETT is a South African writer, freelance editor, activist, and award-winning poet. She has a PhD on PreRaphaelite poetry and has authored or co-authored university textbooks, short story anthologies, non-fiction books on the environment, two poetry collections, and various academic projects. Charlotte is her first novel.

She blogs at helenmoffett.com and can be found on Twitter @heckitty.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

I have been fascinated by the character of Charlotte Lucas, and the choices she made, ever since first reading Pride and Prejudice. In my telling of her story, I have tried to remain faithful to the plot of the original, with a few significant differences: lovers of Pride and Prejudice will know that Charlotte Lucas did not accompany the Bennet family on their visit to Netherfield Park – the occasion on which Mrs Bennet so cruelly and publicly slights the ‘plain’ Lucas girls, Charlotte in particular. One of the questions that prompted the writing of my novel was: ‘What if Charlotte had overheard that conversation?’

The character of Charlotte in the original must surely have been aware of Mrs Bennet’s opinion, and indeed her own mother’s, of her looks: how did this affect her, in a world where the only collateral a single woman without a large dowry had was her beauty? I could not resist this small deviation from the plot because it seemed to me that these issues were vital in driving Charlotte’s subsequent decisions and actions, and I wanted to explore these more closely.