Playin’ Jane

Pamela Aidan not only writes about the world of Jane Austen, she lives it.

Aidan, a resident of Coeur d’Alene for the last three years, is internationally famous for the novels she has written from the perspective of Fitzwilliam Darcy, the romantic lead of Jane Austen’s 1813 novel “Pride and Prejudice.”

She will read from the first of her “Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman” trilogy on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at Auntie’s Bookstore.

The reason she lives here has all the trappings of a Regency romance: a chance encounter, an immediate bond, separation by geography and circumstance, a gradual realization of affection, an eventual meeting and … well, happiness.

You expected something else?

“The biggest change in my life,” Aidan says of her novels, “is that I met my husband through them.”

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s begin seven years ago, when Aidan was living and working in Georgia. A librarian by trade since graduating in 1975 from a small college in Pennsylvania, she had always wanted to write.

As always happens, though, one thing or another kept intruding.

“But when I turned 45, I thought, ‘If you’re going to write, you have to start now or it’s not going to happen,’ ” Aidan says.

A fan since her teens of the Regency romances of British novelist Georgette Heyer, Aidan had always been intrigued by the character of Darcy. The romantic male lead in “Pride and Prejudice” starts out as a seemingly arrogant prig but by book’s end has redeemed himself enough to win the heart of Elizabeth Bennet.

“Austen says very little about Darcy in her book,” Aidan says. “He’s there at the very beginning, he disappears for most of the book, and he’s there at the end when suddenly he’s this changed character whom Elizabeth can respect.”

Aidan was intrigued.

“I felt that I had to know what changed with Darcy,” she says. “He was such a different character at the end of the book, and I wanted to know how that change happened. And nobody was writing it, so I figured I would have to write it myself.”

At the time, thanks to the 1995 BBC “Pride and Prejudice” miniseries – which featured Colin Firth as Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth – interest in Austen grew. Web sites began to pop up.

Aidan discovered that two main ones, www.pemberley.com and www.austen.com, offered writers the opportunity to write their own stories. And she saw this as her chance to explore the inner Darcy.

“What was so attractive was that there was opportunity for others to comment,” she says. “It was a great way to get immediate feedback.”

Her first efforts, she says, earned “a fantastic response. Everybody loved it, so I thought, ‘This is interesting. I wonder if I can do a whole book.’ “

Through posting “bits and pieces” at both sites, Aidan managed to do just that. Pretty soon she had started her own site, begun work on the second book – “Duty and Desire” – and found herself receiving “thousands and thousands” of hits.

“The last time I looked it was almost 100 countries,” Aidan says. “At least one from each and thousands from the United States, England, Australia and some of the European countries. So I knew that people liked what I was doing.”

Here’s where the story gets personal: One of those responses came from Michael Mogen, a technical writer living in Coeur d’Alene.

“He was the first person who wrote to me who had something critical to say,” Aidan says. “I had gotten a lot of gushy letters that I really pretty much discounted. But when he wrote, he said what he liked, and he said what he didn’t like.”

After she’d written to thank him, he wrote a second time. This time, however, he took a chance.

“I opened it up and it was Darcy talking to me,” Aidan says. “He wrote in the persona of Darcy, saying, ‘Oh, I appreciate you taking my life and revealing it. I always wondered what I was doing.’ “

Pretty soon they were corresponding on a regular basis. But only as friends.

It took years for them to meet in person, that moment coming when he picked her up and drove her to a conference in Moscow, Idaho.

“After that weekend, I went back home,” Aidan says. “And a year later we decided we wanted to see if marriage was in the picture. So I came out here and looked for a job. Within six months, we decided, yup.”

By that time, she was halfway through the final book of the trilogy – “These Three Remain” – and the couple decided to start their own publishing company. Mogen designed the inside of the books, a fan of Aidan’s volunteered to design the covers, and the series turned out to be the most professionally polished example of self-publishing you’re likely to see.

Which is why, one, Aidan has sold some 70,000 copies (at $13.95 apiece) and, two, Simon & Schuster came calling, ultimately offering a $150,000 advance.

Simon & Schuster released its version of “An Assembly Such As This” in May. The final two are scheduled to follow, respectively, in October and January.

After that? More Austen, of course.

“Everybody wants me to continue the story beyond the marriage,” Aidan says. “And at first I was really resistant. Other people have tried that, and I don’t want to compete with that.

“But I didn’t really start out to do all this. It was an experiment that went horribly awry. So I felt I needed to stop traipsing after Jane, as I call it, and get on with my own stories, develop my own characters.”

At the same time, not much else – aside from her marriage – has changed. Though now an author with a big-time publishing house, Aidan still gets up at 5 a.m. to get in a couple of hours writing before going to work as director of the Liberty Lake Municipal Library.

And she continues to have, as she says, “the greatest respect for Austen and her characters.”

“I try to approximate Austen, but I don’t try to copy her,” Aidan says. “I know I’m not Austen, and I don’t try to be. But if people can suspend a little bit of doubt, I think they’ll enjoy what I wrote. And it’ll ring true.”