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Town and Country

Fandom: Pride and Prejudice Words: 44,109 Status: WIP Pairings: Elizabeth Bennet/Fitzwilliam Darcy; Jane Bennet/Charles Bingley (background) Rating: General Audiences Setting: Regency

Summary: Elizabeth Bennet is South Asian.

Sample:

When an Englishman desires activity, inactivity, change, stasis, simplicity, intricacy, strangeness, familiarity, or the pleasure of managing, of not managing, or of having his own way, he will look—very naturally—to India. However little calculated that land, in itself, may be to fulfill these little caprices, its ideal is so fixed in his mind, that he is sure to find something within the stores of its ancient civilisation to answer to his notions.

Such was the case with Mr. Edward Bennet. The second son of a minor country squire, he was faced, at his majority, with the necessity of fixing upon some course, which would enable him to make his own way in the world. From a scholarly bent, which gave him a good deal of inborn curiosity; and because the idleness of habits, which he had heard to be common in the East, attracted him more than the manly rigour required for the practice of the legal or ecclesiastical professions in England; from these reasons, and perhaps still others, he left a country happily enlightened by sound philosophy, and the only true revelation, for one burdened with superstition and gross idolatry: he joined, in short, in the service of the East India Company at Bombay, soon after it was ceded to the English, and before he had attained his sixteenth year. Once his innate indolence had overcome the exigencies of the journey thither, it was not often further disturbed by any requirements of his post. His work as a writer for the Company kept him largely within its settlements in the western part of the state of Hindoostan; on the rare occasions when he left Bombay, it was only for Chaul or Bassein.

Mr. Edward Bennet had always intended to marry upon returning to his native England, when his contributions of learning to the Company would have earned him an independence. He was yet in India, however, when he was nearing forty; he grew increasingly susceptible to beauty, and ripe for picking; he was caught at last by a girl with gentle manners, a generous dowry, and remarkable beauty (so far as we can reconcile beauty with the olive complexion). She was the daughter of a Mahomedan merchant and moneylender, who had much to do with the India Company, and was very pleased to furnish one of its votaries with this his most precious good.

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[ID: A promo photo of Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy smirking at the camera. Overlaid is a text post by kittykatninja321 that reads "The adventures of haterboy and hatergirl". End ID]

This came to me in a vision

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I've been putting on Jane Austen novels while doing chores, like a podcast and. The cadence of her novels is SO good por audio booking. It is JUST the right balance between fast enough to engage, and not so fast you miss stuff while you're looking for the soap. RIP Jane Austen you would have loved the audiobook.

I forgot about this ask, sorry, but I did smile at it! It reminded me of an analysis of Pride and Prejudice from, I think, the earlyish 20th century (in Reuben Brower's The Fields of Light) that talks about how the first half of P&P in particular "sounds" like theatre, like it was written to be performed on stage. Of course, P&P itself wasn't literally written for the stage, but to go by Austen's letters, it absolutely was written to be read aloud and I think the consideration of sound and cadence remains present in a lot of her mature work.

Novels at the time were often pretty dense, far more than she ever was, and speech in particular can seem stiff and unnatural to our ears, even accounting for changing norms in how people actually speak. So you really feel the contrast with just how stylish and dynamic Austen's use of language is even when reading other novelists of her era. She wasn't disconnected from her literary moment at all, but there's a reason that even people at the time often saw her work as extraordinary—I really like some of these other authors, but there is a tight control and rigor about Austen's style that I think very few others in her sort of milieu really had.

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JAFF Trope Inversion Bingo

About

The JAFF Trope Inversion Bingo is a light-hearted fic-writing challenge for the Jane Austen fandom. Participants are challenged to write fics based on prompts that are inverted versions of popular Jane Austen fanfiction tropes.

How to participate

1. Use the bingo card generator to generate a bingo card. (Please copy or screenshot your card for safekeeping, as the generator will randomise a new set of prompts whenever the page is reloaded.)

2. Complete a bingo by filling three prompts from your card to create either a vertical, horizontal or diagonal line on the card. You can write a separate fic for each prompt or combine more than one prompt into the same fic.

3. Post your fic(s) wherever you usually post your fanfiction. AO3 users are encouraged to add their fics to the event collection, but you do not need an AO3 account to participate in the bingo.

4. Enjoy you bragging rights!

Schedule and deadlines

No schedule, no deadlines! The bingo card generator will remain up for the foreseeable future, and the AO3 collection will be open indefinitely. You can generate as many bingo cards as you want whenever you want and post your fics whenever you finish them.

FAQs and public bingo cards

Check out the info post on Dreamwidth.

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All my Pride and Prejudice fics

I made 3 new series to hold all of my Elizabeth/Darcy Pride and Prejudice fics so they're easier to find and to subscribe to just the type you want:

Elizabeth/Darcy post-canon fluff: just sweet little G-rated ficlets showing moments from their married life

Pride and Prejudice missing/retold scenes: scenes that we know happened in canon but weren't shown on page, or scenes that were shown on page but from a different POV

Elizabeth/Darcy smut: just what it says on the tin. This one I set up as a collection, not series, since the stories take place in different versions of the P&P universe. (Though I'm reconsidering this now as I don't think you can subscribe to a collection?)

If you read and enjoy one of the stories in these series, or anything I've written, please leave me a comment! Thanks friends!

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It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).

The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.

This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.

I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.

Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.

It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.

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*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.

**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.

The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."

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Mary Bennet and Her Sisters

@atablefullofwriting

Very well thought out!!! I wonder what your thoughts would be on P&P Mary and her relationship to the other sisters. She just seems to be put on the backburner so much, especially when Mr. Collins comes along.

I am not very fancy with Tumblr yet, but I shall endeavour to answer this question:

We most often see the Bennet girls in pairs, Jane & Elizabeth and Kitty & Lydia. However, with five sisters, we are drawn into wondering why there isn’t a trio. Why is Mary alone? From all evidence, it seems like Mary excludes herself, not that she is excluded.

When Elizabeth wants to go visit sick Jane, she announces her intention. Mary basically calls her foolish, Lydia and Kitty offer to accompany Elizabeth as far as Meryton:

Keep reading

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For the past several years (and perhaps longer) in the P&P fandom I've seen a lot of people who want to rehabilitate Mrs. Bennet: like, sure, she's uncouth and seems greedy, but it's because she cares so much about her daughters' futures; her situation is actually really stressful and uncertain and she's powerless to change it and her husband makes fun of her, and so it's natural that it would cause her to be anxious all the time; maybe she doesn't have the intelligence or social awareness to understand that her behaviour is actually harming her daughters' prospects, but at least her heart is in the right place.

I'm usually not the type of person who argues that fandom is actually being too nice to a female character, but in this case I don't buy the counter-narrative (which I think is popular enough at this point to be fanon / a narrative in itself) about Mrs. Bennet.

For one thing, she was never really powerless in this situation. These people are rich even for gentry. Mr. Bennet's income was always good, at 2,000 pounds per annum (even though I can't believe he isn't neglecting some practices that could raise it higher). Mrs. Bennet had 4,000 pounds from her parents and a further 1,000 from Mr. Bennet. Invested in the 4 per cents (for example), this is 200 pounds per year in pin money that Mrs. Bennet could spend without touching the principle of her dowry, and without affecting Mr. Bennet's income. This is more than some people's entire yearly incomes.

The picture of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet that we get in P&P is not of people who are helpless against their circumstances, but of people who are extraordinarily neglectful. We're told that:

Mr. Bennet had very often wished, before this period of his life, that, instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum, for the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived him. [...] When first Mr. Bennet had married, economy was held to be perfectly useless; for, of course, they were to have a son. This son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for. Five daughters successively entered the world, but yet the son was to come; and Mrs. Bennet, for many years after Lydia’s birth, had been certain that he would. This event had at last been despaired of, but it was then too late to be saving. Mrs. Bennet had no turn for economy; and her husband’s love of independence had alone prevented their exceeding their income.

We also know that the "continual presents in money which passed to [Lydia] through her mother’s hands," plus her allowance and food, amount to about 90 pounds per year. Rather than saving up from the beginning in case the entail is not broken, rather than beginning to save once it's clear a son will not arrive, rather than making Jane's dowry the full 5,000 from her mother (which would be something) and saving up for the younger girls' dowries thereafter—which is what would be typical, and that's why Lady Catherine was so shocked that all the girls were out at once—Mrs. Bennet's housekeeping, dress, the girls' allowance, presents of money over and above their allowance, plus whatever Mr. Bennet is spending money on (and other expenses relating to servants, carriages, maintenance &c. which are unavoidable), add up to their entire income. The only reason why Mrs. Bennet doesn't overspend even that is that that's where Mr. Bennet puts his foot down.

Mrs. Bennet is actively harming her daughters' prospects, not even of marriage, but of living respectably if they don't marry, because she doesn't have the temperance not to spend all of the income that is allotted to her. It is the role of the woman in a marriage to take charge of the housekeeping, servants, cooking, furniture, and all expenses relating thereto (plus certain attentions to her tenants and any living in genteel poverty in the area, though presumably this will depend on her income and whether there's a parish church with a parson's wife who's doing some of these things). She's an adult who should be competent to manage these things in a reasoned way without needing to be dictated to.

It is supposed to be the role of the woman in a marriage to take charge of her daughters' education—and yet Mrs. Bennet did not hire a governess, and Elizabeth says that she didn't spend much time teaching her daughters anything (it's not clear to what degree she's educated herself). Granted, the girls did have masters—but, from the sounds of things, that was only if they requested them. No one was required to learn much of anything, which will probably further harm the marriage prospects of the girls who "chose to be idle."

I think the "point" of Mrs. Bennet is that she is one half of one type of bad marriage which the novel illustrates, in contrast with the Gardiners' marriage. These marriages are two possible models for the Bennet daughters to look to. At one point, Elizabeth's prospective marriage is explicitly compared to her parents', with her in the role of her father: Mr. Bennet says "My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life" (emphasis original).

We might wonder whether Elizabeth saw herself potentially in the role of her father, in a marriage that was very intellectually unequal, when she rejected Mr. Collins; or whether she also saw herself in the role of her mother, married to a man who insults and doesn't respect her, when she rejected Mr. Darcy. Ultimately, she accepts Mr. Darcy after she realises that he is nothing like her father; that he is diligent in attending to his responsibilities, and that he does evidently respect her mind.

This isn't me defending Mr. Bennet, who is also a bad parent and a bad spouse. I do, however, find it a little disturbing when people suggest that Mr. Bennet is at fault for not controlling or curtailing his wife. His wife is a grown woman. Surely we don't actually believe that a situation where a man is legally in complete control over his wife, merely because he is a man and she is a woman, is in any way natural, moral, or just? (This also goes for people who suggest that Mr. Bingley needs to get his sister 'in line' 😬😬😬.)

Mrs. Bennet should be competent to manage her household and her daughters. Given that she's not, yes, Mr. Bennet, according to Georgian and Victorian ideas of the role of a man in a marriage, "should" have stepped in and started dictating to her. But I don't really think that's what Austen is suggesting went wrong here. The models of good marriages we have—the Gardiners, the Bingleys and Darcys after their weddings—are all ones in which the women were basically sensible people to begin with. In the latter two cases, we are told of particular ways in which the men stand to benefit from some mental quality of their future spouse (Elizabeth's good humour and ease in company; Jane's steadiness and determination).

The ideal which some Georgians had of a husband's role being to shape his wife's intellect doesn't seem to be what's being advocated here. If Mr. Bennet made a mistake, it was in marrying a silly, selfish, ill-tempered woman to begin with, not in failing to browbeat her into submission once he found out that she was silly, selfish, and ill-tempered. The idea is that you should choose your spouse carefully. But that message doesn't work if Mrs. Bennet is just a woman in a difficult situation who has her heart in the right place.

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A Promise So Wholly Unreasonable

Fandom: Pride and Prejudice Words: 44,109 Status: Complete Pairings: Elizabeth Bennet/Fitzwilliam Darcy; Jane Bennet/Charles Bingley (background) Rating: General Audiences Setting: Regency

Summary: Lady Catherine de Bourgh catches on and makes her demands much earlier in the narrative. Having no reason not to, Elizabeth promises never to accept a proposal from Mr. Darcy. How do they get past this bump in the (50 miles of good) road?

Sample:

Elizabeth returned from her revealing interview with Colonel Fitzwilliam with no very pleasant feelings; and the agitation of her mind was due only to increase over the course of the day. The afternoon’s occupation of crying, and of exasperating herself with lengthy consideration of the injury which Mr. Darcy’s prideful interference had done her sister, succeeded to the no more pleasant evening’s occupation, of nursing the head-ache which resulted.

Mr. Collins, Charlotte, and Maria departing then for Rosings, Elizabeth staid instead behind at the Parsonage; divided between being really unhappy over Jane, and resolving not to be unhappy over Colonel Fitzwilliam himself. He had made it clear that he had no intentions at all: his upcoming departure from Kent, therefore, could be of no great moment to her, save in the loss of agreeable conversation, which must be its consequence.

While settling this point, she was suddenly roused by the sound of the door-bell; and her spirits were a little fluttered by the idea of her visitor being that same gentleman, whom these contemplations concerned. He had once before called late in the evening, and might now come to inquire particularly after her. But this idea was soon banished, and her spirits were very differently affected, when, to her utter amazement, she saw Mr. Darcy walk into the room.

In a hurried manner he immediately began an inquiry after her health; she answered him with cold civility. He sat down for a few moments, and then getting up, walked about the room. Elizabeth was surprised, but said not a word. After a silence of several minutes, he came towards her in an agitated manner—and halted abruptly, when the door-bell sounded once again.

Elizabeth's amazement surpassed even what she had lately felt, when the door re-opened, and Lady Catherine swept through it, with an air more than usually ungracious.

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The Wickham Fund

According to Darcy, he paid Wickham 3000 pounds instead of his inheritance.

According to Mrs. Gardiner, Darcy paid approximately 3000 pounds to secure the wedding of Wickham and Lydia.

Obvious Conclusion: Mr. Darcy has a 3k Emergency Fund that he keeps having to use for Wickham.

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[ID: Lady Catherine de Bourgh in the BBC 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, edited to say "If I had ever written it, it should be a true masterpiece." End ID]

Me and a fellow writer lovingly describing our extensive lists of plot bunnies to each other:

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can't say enough positive things about the humble square bracket in a writing draft. [place name] [adjective] [description of x] you have saved me from staring at a poorly crafted sentence for hours more times than you could ever know,

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JaOctGoHoNo 2024

Derbyshire Writers' Guild (DWG) sure an annual Halloween writing prompt called JaOctGoHoNo (Jane Austen October Gothic Horror Nonsense). All one-shots are posted on 31-October (at different times in different time zone, so it makes an interesting day-and-a-half), some of us cross post our stories on AO3 and elsewhere.

This year's prompt is 🔪. 🔪. 🔪.

Enchantment

And I am shouting this into the void in the hopes that someone shouts back.

You Are Cordially Invited

To participate in JaOctGoHoNo 2024. The writing challenge is to produce:

A one shot

Based on the works of Jane Austen

Written by you some time in October

Posted on 31-October (whatever time zone you're in)

That somehow satisfies the prompt (Enchantment).

If you're posting on DWG, that should get you sorted. If you're posting on AO3, please include the JaOctGoHoNo Challenge tag. If you're posting elsewhere, drop me a note so I can shout about it 👻

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I mean, to be clear, "to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" is to continue living through them; "to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing, end them" is to die. So actually the results of these two polls are contradictory.

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X

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my name is thorp and wen i sit uppon my gig were two can fitt i go reel fast i dodj the wals i am da best com lik ma bals