Book Review: Pride and Premeditation by Tirzah Price

Pride and Premeditation by Tirzah Price

Book title: Pride and Premeditation
Author: Tirzah Price
Genre: YA historical mystery, Jane Austen retelling
Published: April 6, 2021
368 pages
My rating: 3/5

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a brilliant idea, conceived and executed by a clever young woman, must be claimed by a man.”

Seventeen-year-old Lizzie Bennet dreams of becoming a barrister like her father. When she learns of the murder of Mr. Hurst, she quickly deduces that the man suspected of the murder, Mr. Bingley, might be innocent. She suggests to Bingley that they find the real murderer, but she is faced with opposition from Bingley’s friend and lawyer, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. 

Pride and Premeditation is Tirzah Price’s young adult historical murder mystery inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I read it for this year’s Jane Austen July. This was the first Jane Austen inspired murder mystery I’ve read, and I was excited to see how the author would handle the source material in a new setting.

The murder mystery was interesting enough, although if you’ve read Pride and Prejudice, you know that list of usual suspects is rather short. Where the book most fell flat with me were in the Pride and Prejudice elements. There was no chemistry between Lizzie and Darcy. Over the course of the entire book, Lizzie and Darcy meet five times (six, if you count the epilogue). That means that the slow burn of enemies gradually turning to lovers is replaced with almost insta-love, where Lizzie starts to have feelings for Darcy the second time they meet.

It also doesn’t make sense why everyone expects Mr. Collins to propose to Lizzie, when Jane is free and hasn’t met Bingley yet. There’s also a confusing segment in Collins’s proposal where Lizzie doesn’t actually refuse him (she simply says she hasn’t given an answer yet), but Collins jumps to the conclusion and thinks that she will – Mr. Collins would never!

There are other cases where Pride and Premeditation uses direct quotes from the source material to a confusing result. For example, the decision to make Lizzie seventeen leads to some problems – especially since she still claims that all her younger sisters are out. If we suppose the age differences between the sisters are the same as in Pride and Prejudice, Lydia would be, what, twelve? And even if poor Mrs. Bennet had given birth to four children in consecutive years, Lydia would still be only fourteen, too young to come out into society.

The author acknowledges in the author’s note that the book is intentionally anachronistic, but I found myself becoming increasingly annoyed with this book as I kept reading. Lizzie thinking that she could become a barrister in Regency England makes her seem incredibly naïve. It would have made more sense if the book had been set a hundred years later to the early 20th century. The societal expectations and limitations for women would have been closely the same but at least becoming a barrister would have been a possibility for Lizzie (the first woman was called to the bar in the UK in 1922).

The average teen reader might not care about the anachronisms and will probably enjoy the book more than I did. But if you want your historical fiction to be as anachronism-free as possible (and want more of a slow-burn romance between Lizzie and Darcy), I suggest you skip this book. I debated between two and a half and three stars but ended up giving this book three stars.