A House of Daughters - Chapter 4

A Pride and Prejudice Variation

With my first novella, Letter to Georgiana, now available for pre-order on Amazon, I’m excited to begin sharing a brand-new project.

A House of Daughters is a Pride and Prejudice variation that asks: what if Elizabeth Bennet, just after returning from Hunsford, didn’t simply accept her family’s flaws in silence? What if, in a moment of frustration, she spoke her mind in front of everyone?

This story begins with that outburst—and traces its ripple effects. The Bennet sisters are forced to reckon with how they’re perceived, both within and beyond Longbourn, and what that perception might cost them.

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What to Expect

• Multiple POVs – Follow Lydia, Kitty, Mary, and Jane as they navigate change, reflection, and responsibility.

• Romance – Darcy and Elizabeth’s story unfolds in the background, witnessed (and sometimes misinterpreted) by the people around them.

• Emotional depth – Introspection, character growth, and sisterly bonds take center stage.

I’ll be publishing two chapters per week, right here.

These posts will remain available until one month after the final chapter is released, at which point the complete and edited version will be published on Kindle and enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. (Expect a few refinements in the final draft.)

Thank you for reading, I hope this story brings something new and a little surprising to your love of Jane Austen.

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Chapter 4: Not For an Audience

Lydia Bennet hung upside-down on the drawing room settee, bare feet in the air, as if boredom might fall loose like dust from a rug.

It had been three days since Kitty’s departure for London, and already the walls of Longbourn seemed to press inward with a dull, breathless sameness.

No visitors had called.

She sighed loudly, hoping someone might comment, but the room remained unhelpfully occupied only by a sunbeam and a few motes of dust. The house was dead.

From the distant parlor came the steady, uninspired rise and fall of scales, Mary at the pianoforte again. Lydia groaned and swung her legs back to the floor.

She could not decide which was worse: the boredom or the virtue. Since Elizabeth’s dramatic speech and Papa’s restrictions, Longbourn had become a convent. A dull, judgmental, pianoforte-ridden convent.

She found Mary seated with upright rigidity, playing a particularly sorrowful arrangement of Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice,” her expression blank but intent.

“I should think the piano might have taken ill by now,” Lydia said, folding her arms and leaning against the doorframe. “All those dirges. You will mourn it into silence.”

Mary glanced up. “It is not a dirge. It is a lament. And one of great musical merit.”

Lydia rolled her eyes, but the correction stuck, quiet as a burr. “It is tedious, is what it is.”

Mary returned to the keys without replying, her fingers plodding through another minor key progression.

“Oh, honestly,” Lydia said, stepping further into the room. “Do you ever play anything light? Something one might dance to, instead of bury?”

A voice floated in from the hallway. “She might, if you asked with less disdain.”

Elizabeth entered, boots still damp from the garden, her shawl draped loosely over one shoulder. She crossed the room and paused beside Mary, who was laboring through the final bars of “Che farò senza Euridice”, her fingers stiff with effort, the notes drawn out like a funeral procession.

Elizabeth studied the sheet music for a moment, then leaned down to tap a particular phrase. “Here,” she said gently. “You are strangling the breath out of it. Let it mourn, not collapse.”

Mary blinked and adjusted her posture. “I thought it required solemnity.”

“True, but he let sorrow sing, not collapse in sobs.”

That earned the faintest flicker of amusement from Mary.

“And perhaps,” Elizabeth added, flipping a few pages, “after this, something whose key does not drag the poor pianoforte into despair?”

Mary looked up, startled. “Do you think Papa might listen if I played something lighter?”

“I do. So long as it does not sound like Eurydice has died again halfway through.”

Mary’s lips twitched—nearly a smile—and Elizabeth settled beside her on the bench. She began turning pages, murmuring quiet suggestions while Mary repositioned her hands.

Lydia lingered in the doorway, arms folded, her expression unreadable. She had never paid much attention to Mary, Mary the bore, Mary the moralist, Mary who always had a sermon disguised as sentiment. But now Mary had Elizabeth beside her. Not correcting her. Not mocking her. Helping her.

They spoke in the easy cadence of shared purpose—conferring like equals—and it struck Lydia, quite unexpectedly, that she was not part of it. No one looked to her for input. No one had asked her to stay.

She turned and walked away, her footsteps muffled by the rug.

Behind her, the notes shifted. The melancholy strains of Gluck gave way to something lighter, a melody in a gentler key, hesitant at first, then blooming into something quietly lovely. She did not recognize it. But it followed her down the corridor with the soft finality of a door closing.

The house felt still in a way she had not noticed before. Too still. Her steps, though soft, landed with the strange clarity of someone walking alone—truly alone—for the first time.

Kitty would have said something by now. Teased her, bumped her shoulder, started humming along to Mary’s playing just to make her laugh. Lydia paused at the foot of the stairs, almost expecting to hear her sister come clattering down behind her, arms full of ribbons or complaints.

But the landing above was empty.

And the silence below offered no reply.

She tightened her shawl around her shoulders, unsettled by how much space one absence could occupy. It had not occurred to her—not really—that Kitty might leave and not be there for her.

✦ ✦ ✦

The next morning dawned grey, and Lydia wandered the garden paths alone. She had grown used to Kitty's skipping gait beside her, their constant, aimless conversations about bonnets, officers, or whose waist looked better in a muslin dress. They never meant anything, but perhaps that was the point. They had filled the spaces between more serious things. Made the days feel lighter.

Now the air itself felt heavier, and the gravel beneath her shoes sounded too sharp, too solitary.

She kicked a pebble on the path, scowling. The roses looked bedraggled. The sparrows, smug.

She was about to return inside when a flicker of motion caught her eye near the arbor. A pale figure in a blue shawl sat hunched on the stone bench, shoulders bowed. Lydia hesitated.

It was Jane.

She had seen her eldest sister cry before, mostly quiet tears in the privacy of her room, or the occasional handkerchief dabbing at misty eyes after particularly romantic passages in novels. But this was different. Jane sat still, head bent, a delicate hand covering her mouth, her other clutching a letter, one Lydia recognized, if dimly, from months ago.

The one from Miss Bingley.

The one Jane had insisted was kind, even as her voice trembled.

The gravel shifted beneath her slipper as she approached.

“Jane?” she called softly.

Jane startled and turned. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her cheeks damp. “Oh… Lydia. I did not hear you.”

Lydia took a step closer, then hesitated. She had never been good with tears, her own came quickly and loudly, demanding immediate attention and comfort. But Jane's sorrow sat differently, deeper somehow.

“Are you... all right?”

Jane gave a shaky smile, folding the letter and tucking it into her reticule. “Yes, of course. The air is damp, that is all.”

“That,” Lydia said, tilting her head, “is not how people usually cry over the weather.”

Jane gave a tiny laugh and looked down at her hands, the silence stretching between them.

Lydia shifted her weight, torn between fleeing back to the house and staying. She had always avoided Jane's quiet sadnesses, finding them too heavy, too complicated. But now, with the garden so still around them, flight seemed somehow cowardly.

“Do you…” she began, then stopped. Started again. “Do you miss him? Mr. Bingley, I mean.”

Jane's hands stilled in her lap. For a moment, Lydia thought she might not answer at all.

“Of course I do,” Jane said finally, her voice barely above a whisper.

Lydia waited, sensing there was more. The morning air felt thick with unspoken things.

“But—” Lydia began, then caught herself. She had been about to say something careless, something about Bingley not being serious, about Jane being too good for him anyway. The sorts of things one said to make tears stop quickly.

“But what?” Jane asked, lifting her eyes.

Lydia looked at her sister—really looked—and saw something she had never noticed before. Jane’s gentleness had always seemed soft, pliable, agreeable. But now, Lydia saw something quiet and unyielding beneath it.

“I was going to say something stupid,” Lydia admitted. “About how maybe he was not serious, or... or how you are better off without him.”

Jane's mouth quirked, almost a smile. “Those are the sorts of things people say, are they not? When someone is hurt.”

“Yes. But...” Lydia frowned, trying to find the words. “But you do not look like you want to hear them.”

“No,” Jane said quietly. “I do not.”

Another silence fell.

“My feelings,” Jane said suddenly, her voice stronger now, “are no laughing matter, Lydia.”

The words were not sharp, but they landed with unexpected weight. Lydia felt something inside her recoil from recognition. How many times had she made light of things that were not light at all? How many times had she assumed that because Jane did not complain, she did not suffer?

“I am sorry,” she said after a moment, and meant it.

Jane's gaze softened, but she did not look away. “You could not have known. I have never... I have always tried to bear things quietly.”

“Too quietly, perhaps?”

Jane considered this, her fingers tracing the edge of her reticule where the letter lay hidden. “Perhaps. I thought if I were patient enough, understanding enough...” She shook her head. “But patience can be mistaken for indifference. And understanding can look very much like not caring at all.”

Lydia stared at her sister—gentle, patient Jane—who was revealing something harder beneath, like finding iron wrapped in silk.

“Do you think he will come back?” Lydia asked.

Jane was quiet for a long moment, her eyes fixed on the distant gate. When she spoke, her voice held something Lydia had never heard there before, resolve.

“I think... if he does, I shall express my own mind better this time. I shall not leave him to guess at what I cannot bring myself to say.”

“And if he does not come back?”

Jane turned to look at her then, and smiled—not the practiced smile from dinner tables, but something smaller and more real.

“Then I shall know I tried. And that will have to be enough.”

Lydia wanted to say something else. Something clever, or comforting, or wise. But her mind felt oddly still, and all her usual phrases seemed suddenly childish. Instead, she reached out and covered her sister's hand with her own.

Jane's fingers were cold, but they curled around Lydia's and held firm.

“Do you want to come inside?” Lydia said finally. “I think Mary is playing something vaguely cheerful for once.”

Jane stood, brushing dew from her skirts, but her grip on Lydia's hand lingered a moment longer than necessary.

“That sounds nice.”

They walked back toward the house together, their footsteps soft on the wet gravel. Lydia found herself matching Jane's slower pace, and for once, she did not feel the need to fill the silence with chatter.

Later that afternoon, Lydia sat alone in the drawing room, legs tucked beneath her, the rain threading down the windows in steady silver lines. The room was dim, lit only by the weak light filtering through the clouds. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked with annoying consistency, and the pianoforte had fallen mercifully silent.

A book rested in her lap, one of Elizabeth’s recommendations, a novel with far too many commas and not enough scandal. She had not turned the page in nearly half an hour. Her eyes flicked over the words, but none of them stayed.

Her mind wandered.

She kept hearing Jane’s voice, not raised, not bitter, just… firm: “My feelings are no laughing matter, Lydia.”

It had not been cruel. But it had cut cleanly through something Lydia had not even known was soft.

And then there was Mary. Awkward, moralizing Mary, who had always been so easy to dismiss, yet Elizabeth had sat beside her, not scoffing, but helping. Mary had smiled, not with triumph, but with quiet pride. There had been no performance. No fuss. Just two sisters working together, and for the first time, Lydia had felt outside it.

So much of her life had been spent being seen by Kitty, by Mama, by anyone who laughed when she laughed loudest. But lately, no one looked. No one responded. And Kitty—Kitty, who always laughed at Lydia’s jokes, who repeated her phrases, who copied her hairstyles, was gone.

The absence was sharper than she had expected. And it was not only the quiet that unsettled her. She had not realized how much she had relied on Kitty to confirm she was worth watching.

She reached for the window, pressed her fingers lightly to the glass. The pane was cold. Outside, the gravel path shimmered wetly. No one walked there. The front gate stood closed, the hedges motionless in the soft rain.

Was this what it felt like when people stopped looking at you? Not rejection but stillness?

Lydia frowned and looked back down at the book. She flipped a page, just for the sound.

She had always believed attention was something you took with laughter, flirtation, color. That to be seen was to be loud. But Elizabeth rarely raised her voice. Jane barely spoke above a whisper. Mary, for all her awkwardness, had earned a quiet kind of respect. And Kitty—Kitty had never been loud like Lydia. She had followed. Echoed. Smiled. And now, she was in London, learning how to be someone without Lydia to mirror.

A thought whispered through her, too unwelcome to stay long: If Kitty did not need her anymore… who was she supposed to be?

She shifted on the settee and drew the blanket more tightly around her shoulders.

The world was not looking at Lydia Bennet today.

And for the first time, she was not entirely sure she wanted it to.

Later, at dinner, the family sat in the hush of clinking silverware and murmured conversation. The dining room felt cavernous with Kitty's empty chair, though no one had thought to remove the place setting.

Mary spoke softly about the new piece she was learning, something in D major, she explained, with a melody that climbed rather than descended. Elizabeth nodded approvingly and asked about the composer. Their conversation had the easy rhythm of shared interest, and Lydia found herself listening despite herself.

“Mary has always been musical,” their father said mildly, not looking up from his plate. “Though I confess I prefer when her selections do not sound like funeral marches.”

Mary's face fell slightly. Elizabeth's fork paused halfway to her mouth.

“I think,” Elizabeth said with deliberate lightness, "that Mary's range is expanding quite nicely. Gluck has his place, but so does Mozart."

“Indeed,” Jane added quietly. “Variety shows skill.”

Mary’s chin lifted. She glanced between her sisters as if startled by the sensation of being defended.

Lydia watched this small drama unfold, noting how Elizabeth and Jane had moved to protect Mary without consultation, how naturally they had formed ranks. When had this happened? When had her three older sisters learned to speak in this gentle coordination?

“Speaking of variety,” their mother interjected, setting down her teacup with a decisive clink, “I do hope the Gardiners will not encourage Kitty to be too solemn. A girl must sparkle a little, if she hopes to catch attention.”

The words landed in the quiet with uncomfortable weight.

“She may surprise us all,” Mr. Bennet said mildly.

“Oh, but she has always been such a lively girl,” Mrs. Bennet continued, oblivious to the sudden stillness around the table. “Just like our Lydia. The two of them together—such spirits! I suppose Kitty on her own might be more... manageable.”

The silence that followed was thick enough to cut. Lydia felt heat creep up her neck. Manageable. As if she were a storm that needed containing, a wildness that required Kitty's absence to become tolerable.

Lydia thought of Kitty’s face, open and round, quick to frown when teased, but quicker still to forgive. She wondered what Kitty was doing at that very moment. Whether she was talking about Longbourn. Whether she had written a letter and decided not to send it.

She had not written one herself.

Not yet.

She stabbed at her carrots and said nothing.

That night, Lydia lay in the dark, the rain whispering against the windowpanes. Across the room, Kitty’s bed waited pristine, silent, not quite empty enough to forget, but too empty to pretend.

She whispered into the pillow:

“I miss you.”

No one heard her.

But for once, she had not said it for an audience.

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