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traeumenvonbuechern · 9 months ago

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Which books would the Hallowoods characters read?

Happy HFTH season 4 day! I'm so excited for the new episodes, and I want to celebrate by recommending some books I think some of the main characters would love.

Diggory Graves - Unwieldy Creatures

I have a feeling that Diggory might be interested in a nonbinary Frankenstein retelling...

Percy Reed - The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

A transmasc protagonist, ghosts, a t4t love story - Percy would relate to this book so much.

Nikignik - This Is How You Lose the Time War

Even aside from the whole Bigolas Dickolas thing, I think Nikignik would really love this book. It's an epic, complicated, super emotional love story, written in a way that almost feels like poetry - I have a feeling that Nikignik would like that.

Lady Ethel Mallory - Lady Susan

It's short, it's funny, it's a classic, it's from the perspective of the villain and said villain uses the title "lady"? Lady Ethel would love this book.

Riot Maidstone - Gideon the Ninth

It's about a butch lesbian with a sword. That alone would probably convince Riot to read it, but I think she would love the story, too.

Olivier Song - Infinity Alchemist

This book is about an alchemist who is rejected by the magic school he tried so hard to get into, and one of the love interests is genderfluid - Olivier might relate to it a little too much.

Clara Martin - The Grimoire of Grave Fates

It's a murder mystery set at a magic school that moves around the world, and it's told from 18 (!) different perspectives. I think Clara would love reading about all these different types of magic and trying to solve the mystery.

Polly - Good Omens

Polly reminds me so much of Crowley sometimes - to quote this post, they're both "demons sent on a celestial audit of earth and catching more feelings than they signed up for" - so Polly would probably either love or hate Good Omens, no in-between.

Yaretzi - The Salt Grows Heavy

I can't really explain why I think Yaretzi would like this book, but she would. Something about the main character being a murderous mermaid, probably.

Mort - All Systems Red

Mort would definitely want to be friends with Murderbot.

Hector Mendoza and Jonah Duckworth - Silver in the Wood

This is my go-to "Read this if you like Our Flag Means Death" book because the main characters remind me a lot of Stede and Ed, but the book also reminds me so much of Hector and Jonah, especially with the magical sentient forest setting.

Zelda Duckworth - The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher

This book is about a 83-year-old Chosen One who has to save the world armed with nothing but gumption and knitting needles - I think Zelda would enjoy that.

Mx. Morrell - What Moves the Dead

I think a fungal horror book with a nonbinary protagonist would be perfect for Mx. Morrell.

Danielle O'Hara - Pet

Pet is about a trans girl who has to reconsider everything she's been taught and save her friend with the help of a terrifying creature - everyone should read this book, but I think Danielle would especially like it.

Book titles:

Diggory Graves: Unwieldy Creatures by Addie Tsai

Percy Reed: The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White

Nikignik: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Lady Ethel Mallory: Lady Susan by Jane Austen

Riot Maidstone: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Olivier Song: Infinity Alchemist by Kacen Callender

Clara Martin: The Grimoire of Grave Fates, edited by Hanna Alkaf and Margaret Owen

Polly: Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Yaretzi: The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

Mort: All Systems Red by Martha Wells

Hector Mendoza and Jonah Duckworth: Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

Zelda Duckworth: The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher by E.M. Anderson

Mx. Morrell: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

Danielle O'Hara: Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

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shaunvrensburg · 11 months ago

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#jane austen #pride and prejudice #mansfield park #emma by jane austen #sense and sensibility #persuasion #sanditon #lady susan #juvenilia #the watsons

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buddyhollyscurls · 5 months ago

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decided to read the collection of Janey's last three unpublished works: Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon

and i have to say that lady susan is so juicey like jane just said i want to write a bitch and she did

#the worst mom #scheming manipulating #gaslight gatekeep girlboss #lady susan #jane austen

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besotted-with-austen · 6 months ago

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The thing about the Horrors in Jane Austen is that they can go from "Oh no, I am in the room with my actual crush and the woman I am actually engaged to! And the sister of my crush doesn't know that I am engaged but my crush might! Shenanigans!" to "Oh no, I am financially dependent on my family and they can refuse to take care of me whenever they feel like it if I don't do what they want" at the drop of a hat.

"Oh no, I have to pass the time and be civil with a girl I do not like because everyone wants me to like her! Why me!" to "Oh no, my future is dictated by someone more richer than me's pity and I cannot change it even if I wanted to no matter how talented I am"

"Oh no, I have to see my ex and he resents me!" to "Oh no, a woman's prospectives are constantly fragile and without a strong safety net she is always at risk".

"Oh no, my crush and his crush keep coming to me to talk about their love problems! Leave me alone! " to "Oh no, everyone is pressuring me to accept the proposal of a man I deeply dislike and I am desperate enough for affection that I might go against all my morals and say yes, since he is the only guarantee I have for my future"

"Oh no, my family is soooo embarassing!" to "Oh no, mine and my sisters' future is uncertain because our father never took precautions for us and our mother doesn't have enough sense to help us choose a good partner-she just want us married and out of the house"

"Oh no, my brother is going after a woman that is notoriously bad news! What to do!" to "Oh no, I live with an abusive mother and I cannot ask for help because she has convinced everyone that I am the problem"

"Oh no, my crush thinks that I ditched him and his sister because my friends told them so! I have to set things straight!" to "Oh no, some people are so convinced of their superiority and used to do whatever they want that they might be the villain of a story"

#jane austen #pride and prejudice #emma #mansfield park #sense and sensibility #persuasion #lady susan #northanger abbey

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cottagecore-raccoon · 5 months ago

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Note: this isn't necessarily asking who you think is the worst parent, just who you personally would struggle with being raised by the most

(Parents who died before the novel began aren't listed here)

#persuasion #jane austen #pride & prejudice #pride and prejudice #northanger abbey #sense and sensibility #jane austen emma #cottagecore-raccoon #polls #tumblr polls #tumblr poll #poll #lady susan #mansfield park

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bethanydelleman · 4 months ago

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As requested, follow up to these polls, you can choose the dowry and your income/profession. If you're a straight woman, gay man, you are now a man or gay or straight or whatever, choose an Austen heroine to be your wife.

#jane austen #mansfield park #pride and prejudice #northanger abbey #sense and sensibility #emma #persuasion #lady susan #polls

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henry-fox-biggest-stan · 2 years ago

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Rating Austen’s first lines (this is a rating of the lines, not the books) (rated based on my thoughts of when I read them for the first time, unaware of what happens later)

1. Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. — Emma

Iconic. Makes you wanna be her in just one paragraph.

2. No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine. — Northanger Abbey

I love this one, I don’t know why

3. A gentleman and a lady travelling from Tunbridge towards that part of the Sussex coast which lies between Hastings and Eastbourne, being induced by business to quit the high road and attempt a very rough lane, were overturned in toiling up its long ascent, half rock, half sand. — Sanditon

Pulls you right in.

4. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. — Pride & Prejudice

It’s a classic.

5. The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. — Sense & Sensibility

Straight to the point.

6. The first winter assembly in the town of D. in Surrey was to be held on Tuesday, October 13th and it was generally expected to be a very good one. — The Watsons

I hope it was.

7. About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income. — Mansfield Park

Good for her.

8. My dear brother,—I can no longer refuse myself the pleasure of profiting by your kind invitation when we last parted of spending some weeks with you at Churchhill, and, therefore, if quite convenient to you and Mrs. Vernon to receive me at present, I shall hope within a few days to be introduced to a sister whom I have so long desired to be acquainted with. — Lady Susan

Not the worst.

9. Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somerset, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. — Persuasion

Didn’t ask about Sir Walter Elliot’s passion for monarchy.

#jane austen #emma woodhouse #emma jane austen #northanger abbey #sanditon #pride and prejudice #pride & prejudice #sense & sensibility #sense and sensibility #the watsons #mansfield park #lady susan #persuasion

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thatscarletflycatcher · 5 months ago

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Tumblr isn't letting me find again @fictionadventurer's and my own posts on epistolary novels, but I have been thinking about it again, because I fell down a Goodreads review rabbit hall and I have thoughts again.

So many people dislike the style, and honestly, I don't blame them, because it's so often done... not well. It is in some aspects, a deceptively easy one, and in others, deceptively hard. And because I'm trying to write a novel with this format myself, I have been thinking about what makes or breaks an epistolary novel.

I talked yesterday about TGLPPS, because it is an interesting case to analyze. I have thought many times about it, and cannot think of a single non-merely-aesthetic reason for it to be told in an epistolary style. A lot of it depends on -British- people who have survived some terrible war conditions willingly opening up to a stranger about their experiences, and that's made... even more difficult if the medium is letters? typically writers will appeal to tropes like making the reserved character drunk, or have them share an extreme experience in isolation with the stranger to create sudden intimacy. None of this is possible in writing; if anything, one is much more self-conscious about the things one writes than the things one says; verba volant, scripta manent.

It seems to me the story would have flowed much more naturally if Juliet had been stranded on Guernsey for some reason -like the first author herself!- suddenly Dawsey commenting that he got a book from her library makes so much more sense! Yes, certainly, if you met a stranger out there, and they introduce themselves and you realize you have a book that once belonged to them, you would tell them so! And it is in this way that the epistolary format does violence to a story that would otherwise sound much less contrived.

Another problem is the large cast of characters and multiple settings. For all I complain about Dracula, Stoker manages this pretty well (of course he has the model of The Woman in White, but TWiW has fewer povs), at least on the first half, because structurally the storylines of the characters are converging, and that does a lot to guide the reader in the understanding of the character's relationships. TGLPPS's relationship structure is more of a multidirectional flow chart, and that becomes confusing really fast.

Another novel I read reviews for recently is one set in WWI, composed of back and forth letters between two lovers torn apart by war, and one common complaint was... that the climactic scenes, the times they meet, etc all happen... off-camera. It is a fair complaint, but also one I cannot really blame the author for, because that's what usually happens with real life compilations of letters of that kind. Sure, usually the editor/compiler will fill in the blanks sometimes and add an epilogue of sorts explaining what happened afterwards, and that is possible if you are writing it fictionally too, but some may think it spoils the effect of immediacy and whatnot, which, fair too.

But it makes me think of how aware Jean Webster was of these difficulties, and how deftly she managed them in both Daddy Long-Legs and Dear Enemy. Both novels have aged badly in terms of content and message, but they are very interesting stylistically.

DLL is a bildungsroman with a dash of romance; through Judy's letters to daddy long-legs we can see how she grows as a person, gaining independence intellectually and economically, and as a writer, as her grammar and vocabulary change and grow. Between making Judy an orphan who hates the orphanage where she has lived her whole life, and one where she lived past the usual age of being thrown into the world, Webster does away with the need for letters between Judy and her friends and family: all her friends and family are her college roommates and her benefactor, who is the person she writes to. The benefactor scheme also makes it so that she doesn't have to write dll's replies, which in turns makes it much more natural and acceptable for the reader when Judy writes him the ending's love letter describing the feelings and impressions of their finally meeting in person and in truth; Judy has become a writer, and she is so used to write to him as another person all the time, that it just makes sense for her to write to him one more letter at the point where her benefactor and her lover become one and the same person. She has written a novel where the core is the correspondence between lovers AND managed to include as well all the moments of their meetings that we would otherwise miss.

Dear Enemy is a similar, but longer and more ambitious story. Instead of one relationship-connection (Judy and Daddy's), we have Sallie as a nod of connections: she's Judy's friend, Jarvis' "employee", the boss of several characters, has a tense colleague-boss relationship with the visiting doctor, a boyfriend of sorts in Washington, and a family we have met before. It is, in that way, a similar setup to TGLPPS: a urban girl of means becomes a fish out of water in a different setting till she ends up assimilating to it, and settling definitely through marriage. But Webster does a few things differently to make it click.

For starters, it is clear to her that this is the story of Sallie's maturation -I have sometimes talked of Dear Enemy as a novel where a Mary Crawford-like character undergoes a transformation arc. The happenings and stories she meets and tells Judy about along the way serve this arc, besides standing on their own as case studies to illustrate the problems, ideology and solutions proposed to the secondary themes of the story (education and social reform). I feel like TGLPPS is much more interested in Guernsey's survival through the war, in which case Juliet's story is already a frame, which, again, makes the epistolary format cumbersome rather than complementary.

Dear Enemy adds more correspondents, but it is very austere/economical with them, and narrows the letters we see to only those Sallie sends. YMMV regarding if it was too much cutting or not, but the undeniable effect is structural soundness; you are never confused by what is happening or who is writing to whom. We can guess the Honorable Cyrus Wykoff probably wrote some indignant letters to Jervis, and those would be funny to read, but... would they be worth the break in the flow of the narrative? I don't think so. To this effect, just having Sallie write a line to the effect of "I expect at this point you have at hand an irate letter from the Hon. Cyrus" is enough to paint a picture for the reader. Perhaps a letter or two from Dr. MacRae would have helped develop his character more -definitely a first read of the story obscures how much misdirection there is in Sallie's narration to Judy, which in turns tends to create an impression of suddenness to the closing letter that doesn't come across well to the reader.

The choice of Sallie mainly writing to Judy is, IMO, a really good one too. It not only establishes a connection with DLL, but it also allows for the intimacy that makes disclosure believable (something TGLPPS struggles with, as I mentioned above). When you add a few letters to the doctor and Gordon and Jervis, you also get a better perspective of Sallie's personality, how she deals not only with a friend, but with acquaintances, romantic partners and coworkers.

From all this it is pretty evident that for Webster the main function of epistolarity as format is aiding in showing psychological and moral development. But that's not the only thing the format can be really good for: perspective is another, and Austen uses it to great effect in both Lady Susan and Lesley Castle.

Both stories deal with mainly static characters, but who have very strong perspectives of the same situation, and it is this singularity of setting and story that anchors the narrative to avoid confusion, while the variety of perspective brings interest. In Lady Susan, we are dealing mainly with the marrying off of Frederica and seduction of Mrs. Vernon's brother, Reginald. There where Lady Susan paints Frederica as an undisciplined, irrational and ungrateful daughter, her sister in law, Mrs. Vernon, paints her as a sweet girl and a victim of her mother's ruthlessness and lack of love. Both agree that Reginald is being seduced, but, of course, with opposite goals: Lady Susan wants him to succumb, Mrs. Vernon, to escape, and this is a delicious struggle for the reader to follow!*

Lesley Castle being an earlier effort, and unfinished, does show some of the defects I have mentioned before (mainly, the relative confusion of having several correspondents in separate storylines), but illustrates well this same perspective effect: Margaret writes to Charlotte about the new Lady Lesley, and the new Lady Lesley writes to Charlotte about about Margaret and her sister... and in these contrasts lies the main interest of the narrative.

Some conclusions to these musings, then:

Not every story is suited to the epistolary format.

The epistolary format seems to work the best when it is used for either A) showcase psychological and moral development B) to play with perspective on people and/or events.

One of the main difficulties of the format is finding a narrative element to anchor and structure the letters around.

It must have a core couple of correspondents, or at most, two. More than that will make it confusing (unless, perhaps, the story is very short and about a single event or two).

A delicate balance must be found so that the secondary correspondence doesn't cut the flow of the main one, and if possible it must feed into it.

*It is interesting how Love and Friendship, being such a delightful -and I sustain one of the best ever- Austen adaptation, is by force of the perspective switch towards a more impersonal third person, more about a love story between Frederica and Reginald than a struggle between Lady Susan and Mrs. Vernon. Which isn't dissimilar to how adaptations of DLL end up being more about the romance between the leads than Judy's coming of age in college; tropes aside, I feel like if the epistolary format is well embedded in the story, it's going to be nearly impossible to reproduce the effect in adaptation.

#writing #epistolary novels #Jane Austen #Jean Webster #Daddy Long-Legs #Lady Susan #Dear Enemy #Lesley Castle #Thinking about Percival and Nadine of course #and how in the end it is trying to be both a psychological and a perspective story #And that might be more than I can chew #But the story is definitely about growth and change in the main character and love interest #And perspective seems so necessary too #Eleanor is the last person alive Percival feels responsibility for #Of course he'd write to her in a light way with jokes and anecdotae #so that she doesn't worry about him #whereas in day to day life he does not have the energy to behave so towards others around him #and both things are important to understand him!#It's the other way around with Nadine #she keeps the cheery façade IRL but can relax when she writes to Beth #And both seem so necessary to me!#But then there *are* things neither tells to anyone and those I'm struggling hard with #I have considered adding journal entries as well back and forth #and remain unconvinced one way or another #anyways this is the way I'll spend 10 years writing an 80 page novelette at this point XD

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