Elizabeth Aston featuring the Darcy, Collins, and Bingley families. The first novel to go out under the "Elizabeth Aston" name, "Mr. Darcy's Daughters", was released as a sequel to "Pride and Prejudice" in 2003. It features the five daughters of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet as they navigate London society while their parents are in Constantinople. The novel was a success for publisher Simon & Schuster, and led the company to produce further Austen adaptations and sequels by other authors, such as Pamela Aidan's "Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman" series. Aston's Darcy series came to include five further novels: "The Exploits & Adventures of
Pride and Prejudice and reviewer George Henry Lewes declared that he "would rather have written "Pride and Prejudice", or "Tom Jones", than any of the Waverley Novels". Charlotte Brontë, however, in a letter to Lewes, wrote that "Pride and Prejudice" was a disappointment, "a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but ... no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck". Austen for her part thought the "playfulness and epigrammaticism" of "Pride and Prejudice" was excessive, complaining in a letter to her sister Cassandra in 1813 that the novel lacked "shade" and should have had