and forward.” There are tales of childhood favourites, teenage reading obsessions and “loans” unreturned decades later. Sharing their writing has always been a part of this. “Because we’ve got this bond of trust and fondness and absurdity, and this shared love of books going all the way back to 13 or 14,” Williams says, “it means we can do the tougher stuff, the gritty stuff, and always know that we’ve got each other’s back. The warmth and support of having a writing partner has been such a treat.”


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t was, perhaps, inevitable that Julia Gray (right) and Imogen Russell Williams (left) would one day write a novel together. The duo have been close since school days, a friendship often


predicated by books, and both have pursued careers in the literary world: Gray as an author and Williams as a writer, editor and critic. Their debut novel, Kitty & Mary, will be published by Andersen Press in September in a deluxe hardback edition. The story of the “forgotten” Bennet sisters from Pride and Prejudice, it is a super lead for Andersen, which is planning an extensive campaign, likely to be amplified by the media surrounding Netflix’s upcoming Pride and Prejudice adaptation. Speaking over video call from Gray’s London


home, the pair have clearly had a ball working together, particularly given that writing is so often a solitary pursuit. “It was the highlight of last year,” Gray admits. “We’ve had this shared love of books and reading all these years; we’re used to talking about books together, sharing ideas and pinging ideas back


bout two years ago they began to seriously discuss writing something together. “We both love revisiting and retelling stories,” Williams explains.


Gray’s YA novels include I, Ada, a fictional account of the life of Ada Lovelace, while Williams has written poetry from the perspec- tives of marginalised women in The Women Left Behind. “That’s our happy place,” she continues. “Most of all, we love muted, unheard female voices that have been eradicated to the background and dismissed.” Initially they pondered a retelling of Pride


and Prejudice, eventually evolving the idea into a sequel. Kitty & Mary begins six months after the events of Jane Austen’s original novel. Stuck at the family home of Longbourn, Mary seizes upon an opportunity for adventure, setting sail to India as the travelling compan- ion to a rich young woman. Kitty, meanwhile, flits around the estates of her sisters before returning home and setting her sights on the eligible new tenant at neighbouring Netherfield Park. Told through a combination of journal entries and letters, this is very much a coming-of-age story as both young women begin to forge their place in the world and come to understand themselves. The cosy nostalgia of revisiting Austen’s world is sharpened by a contemporary lens in a way that feels faithful yet does not jar. Those familiar with the original will find much to delight in, especially the cameos from the wider cast, but the book also works as a satisfying standalone novel.


meant that the characters would be unable to exchange letters back and forth. “This did give us quite a lot of freedom,” Gray recalls, “We both had the overall shape of where the book was starting and finishing but we were able to go off and write and just check in on each other.” Periodically they would slot their chapters into a Word document, finding that they “more or less fitted within [the] structure”.


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here were so many moments of joyful serendipity,” Williams says. “When similar emotional things happened with each sister,


or similar preoccupations emerged.” Was it difficult to capture the voices of characters created by another author? “Personality-wise we each were drawn to a sister that we felt we had a connection to,” says Gray. “That enabled us to bring out the voices quite easily.” The fact that neither character says a huge amount in Pride and Prejudice also worked in their favour. “We had to unpack what motivated these characters and how they think about the world.” “I felt we were discovering, in the writing,


I felt we were discovering, in the writing, what was already there. Mary felt very alive to me from very early on


Imogen Russell Williams


The writing process itself proved to be “very organic”. After some initial discussion – “a very polite little conversation,” Gray laughs – it became clear that each of them felt a particular affinity for one of the characters. Williams took on Mary, and Gray, Kitty. Early on Williams had what Gray calls the “genius idea” of putting Mary on a boat to India, which


what was already there,” Williams continues. “Mary felt very alive to me from very early on.” Williams was diagnosed as autistic in 2024 and, “without wishing to put an anach- ronistic label on a canonical character”, she recalls a “soft gong” moment in her interpreta- tion of Mary. “She’s not very good with social convention and it’s mortifying for her when she gets it wrong. I wonder who that reminds me off,” she laughs. “It just seemed to make sense of her, for me.” She drew on her personal experience again with the decision to send Mary to India. “Because I’m half-Indian but have never lived in India, I loved and relished the opportunity to go on this voyage with Mary and do some discovering from an insider and outsider perspective.” For Kitty’s character, Gray observed that, although she is often present in Pride and Prejudice, she is inevitably trailing after one of the other sisters, without much agency of her own. “She has so little to say for herself. I started with this sense that maybe she doesn’t really know what she is and isn’t, and maybe she needs to find out.” Gray used Bridget Jones, another Austen-inspired creation, as a loose model, feeling that Kitty would embrace Bridget’s attempts at self-improvement. I ask how consciously they considered how


today’s teenage readers would view these characters, and the two agree that it felt neces- sary to introduce themes like sexuality, neuro- diversity, racism and prejudice – ideas, I suggest, that Austen, with her love of social commentary, would likely be writing about if she was alive today. “But also,” Williams adds, “a sense of interiority and emotional self- examination. As a teenager you do lots of thinking, lots of wondering about who you are and why you are doing things.”


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