What Kitty Did Next Book Review

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is one of my favorite books. If you also love this book, you’ll like this new “sequel” called What Kitty Did Next. Quotes around “sequel”, because of course this wasn’t written by Jane Austen. What Kitty Did Next was written by Carrie Kablean. Same characters, same setting, and the book picks up where Pride and Prejudice left off. When you read this sequel, you can really see how much Kablean loves the Bennett sisters. 

This sequel is focused on Kitty Bennet. In the original novel, Kitty’s kind of the forgotten youngest sister. Mr Bennet calls her one of the silliest girls in England, but to me, she just seems like a typical teenager. If you need an Austen refresher, there are 5 Bennet daughters, but by the end of P&P, the oldest Bennet girls, Jane and Lizzie, have both married well, to Bingley and Darcy respectively. Lydia has married, uh, significantly less well, to Wickham. 

Kitty, just like the rest of us reading Pride and Prej, can’t help wondering why Mary and Mr Collins didn’t get married, but in this reimagining, Mary happily marries a missionary and sets off for India. With all her sisters married off, this leaves Kitty alone. 

Kitty is a bit at a loss, but soon the Bingleys and the Darcys show her a new side of society. Her new friendship with Georgiana Darcy replaces her previous closeness with Lydia, and readers can see silly Kitty maturing into a cheerful, but thoughtful and compassionate young woman. There’s a charming focus on young women’s friendship here that I really enjoyed, because I think in real life our friendships can influence us and help us so much, so this felt realistic and relatable, even though the story is set in regency England, with all the old-fashioned social customs. 

Kitty and Georgiana’s happy times are upset when Lydia invites herself to Pemberley and starts causing drama at a summer ball. Lydia hasn’t grown much since her marriage, but her high spirits seem tacky to Kitty now. Lydia’s teenage silliness is turning to shallow, self-centeredness, while Kitty is maturing. Without revealing too much, a bit of Lydia’s drama leaves Kitty looking guilty, and others are quick to assume that foolish little Kitty is at fault, and this sets a lot of the story’s conflict in motion. 

Again, I don’t want to give the story away, but just a few pages into the novel, our Kitty says she’ll surely never marry a vicar, which obviously meant she was 100% certain to fall in love with one. So I was on the lookout for a suitable vicar throughout the book, carefully inspecting any mention of young men with a possible career in the church, just as carefully as Mrs Bennet would have, to see if this was a suitable husband for Kitty. 

Fans of Pride and Prejudice will enjoy this return to the Bennet family.