What approach to take to writing my novel

A major decision when writing Darcy’s Story was how much of Jane Austen's conversation between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet to use. Either Jane Austen's dialogue had to be changed into description only, or there needed to be some form of commentary to show that Darcy had a very different view of the situations and their conversations when he and Elizabeth were both present.

I decided that the story would be more enjoyable if I used the second approach, even though that meant repeating some lengthy sections of dialogue which Jane wrote.
What I could not do was use different words between them for the conversations which Jane Austen herself had "reported"!

There has been a lively debate on this subject over the years, but I still hold to my view that an alternative version to JA’s words is not an acceptable approach.