The Learning Curve
By Melissa Nathan
If there is one thing that has remained constant in my love life since I was 17, it is that I have always loved one Fitzwilliam Darcy and equally but differently, one Lizzie Bennet. So the reason why I have picked up every single one of Melissa Nathan’s books, is because the first book I read of hers was Pride, Prejudice and Jasmine Fields. That book was not outstanding because it was great writing or had a novel plot (how could it?), it stood out because of all the lousy Pride and Prejudice spinoffs, sequels, fanfics I had read, this one was actually readable! (More on this in another post – Pride and Prejudice always deserves its own post. Perhaps even a category!)
So I’ve read Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Fields; Persuading Annie; The Nanny; The Waitress; and now The Learning Curve. While I do not remember The Nanny and The Waitress anymore, one reason why The Learning Curve made a deeper impression was probably because this was Melissa Nathan’s last piece of work. She died of cancer two months after finishing the novel, making the acknowledgements much more poignant to read. Her young son was only 3 when she died, but sometimes cancer doesn’t care. Love and right relationships endure however, as her books have tried to convey.
What struck me (and secretly pleased me) while reading The Learning Curve was the recognition that Melissa Nathan is a fellow Pride and Prejudice fan through and through. While reading it, shades of Pride and Prejudice (or First Impressions, as it was originally titled) leapt to mind: the likeable, spunky heroine (Nicky Hobbs) and the hero, Nicky’s favourite student’s single father (Mark Samuels) have terrible first impressions of each other; when she gives him what-for at an attraction charged encounter, it is the beginning of his realisation that he had been too proud to listen or to be a good parent, and he changes his life dramatically. Which of course leads to a thawing of affections on Nicky’s side. Throw in a caddish Wickham on the side, some silent suffering by both characters and there you have it, Pride and Prejudice repackaged.
Except not.
The best thing about the Learning Curve is how Melissa Nathan has taken a few Pride and Prejudice motifs - perhaps out of habit, because how many boy meets girl plots can there exist in the world anyway? – and made them into her own, populating them in a world of her writing. I enjoyed the Pride and Prejudice shoutouts, but the plot unlike her first novel Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Fields, is all hers, not (deliberately) borrowed from Jane Austen. It is also a lovely parallel to Jane Austen, whose first and last novels, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, were the most similar to each other in her body of works in theme and romantic hopefulness, tempered and differentiated by the years of experiences in between. And that, to echo So You Think You Can Dance judges, shows growth, and is worthy of respect.
