Thomas Langlois Lefroy
In 1796, Lefroy began a flirtation with English novelist Jane Austen, who was a friend of an older female relative. Jane Austen wrote two letters to her sister Cassandra mentioning "Tom Lefroy", and some have suggested that it may have been he whom Austen had in mind when she invented the character of Mr. Darcy in "Pride and Prejudice", as the courtship between Tom Lefroy and Jane Austen took place over the year or so that "Pride and Prejudice" was written. In his 2003 biography, "Becoming Jane Austen", Jon Spence suggests that Jane Austen actually used her and Tom LeFroy's personalities as the models for Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, but not in an expected way. Spence suggests that Jane Austen used Tom Lefroy's more gregarious personality as the model for the novel's heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and her own measured demeanor was used as the model for the male protagonist, Mr. Darcy. So while the exact influence of Tom Lefroy on "Pride and Prejudice" continues to be debated, it does seem certain that his presence in Austen's life is in some way reflected in the novel.
Old Friends and New Fancies
"Old Friends and New Fancies" is set in the same time as Austen's own novels and is similarly structured, with a focus on the challenges of matchmaking among pairs of lovers kept apart by various social and economic tensions. It has something of a postmodern overtone in that it mixes together characters from all six of Austen's major novels, creating an enormously extended network of friends, relations, and acquaintances. For example, Elizabeth (Bennet) Darcy (of "Pride and Prejudice"), Elinor (Dashwood) Ferrars (of "Sense and Sensibility"), and Anne (Elliot) Wentworth (of "Persuasion") are all friends. Despite the fact that Brinton provides a full list of characters (sorted by their source books), keeping the cast straight is something many readers complain about, since quite a few of the characters are only mentioned in passing. Most of the characters are recognizably the same, though several have improved—among them Kitty Bennet and Tom Bertram—while George Knightley is somewhat sourer and Mary Crawford much less lively than in Austen's depictions. The largest single change from Austen's own books is that Marianne Dashwood's husband, Colonel Brandon, has died before the book opens. Although the book jacket proclaims that Brinton mixes in "new characters of the author's devising," none of the new characters are of any great importance. Because many of the key characters hail from "Pride and Prejudice", some critics treat "Old Friends and New Fancies" primarily as a sequel to that particular book. "Mansfield Park" is the next best represented novel in terms of major characters.