#anne/elizabeth

[baubeautyandthegeek]

The Claim - Anne Beauchamp Neville/Elizabeth Woodville

A/N: Day 13 for @chickycherrycola 's Cherrytober.

It had been easy to be sharp with Anne in front of her daughters, but Elizabeth had seen the pain in the woman when she left. Now, when Anne comes to her again, Elizabeth moves to kiss her gently, her voice soft. “Forgive me, my Anne.” Her words were followed by tender touches, her love showing in how gently she undressed her lover, her dear Anne, even as she trailed soft hands around her from behind on placing her in front of the mirror, her touch soft. “Look at you, my love… so beautiful.” She’s quiet as she lets Anne undress her, turning to kiss her again as she moves to knees when she has Anne sat for her, her voice soft. “Watch yourself, my love, see what I see.” Her attentions are slow, tender and she works her way up from Anne’s inner thigh to the place she most wants to be, between Anne’s thighs, enjoying Anne’s soft moans and the feeling of Anne’s hands in her hair, allowing her free movement without worrying about trapping herself, her focus all the more intense as she works to bring Anne to her peak, moving swiftly to slip over her once Anne falls back into the bed, pressing loving kisses to Anne’s face, her voice soft. “Forgive me, my Anne?” “Forgiven.” Anne’s whisper is tender even as she wraps herself in Elizabeth’s love, letting her hands skim over soft skin. “Forgiven, my Queen, my Lizzie.”

[anghraine]

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.

------------

*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."

[borgialucrezia]

— I love you, Elizabeth. I love you with all my heart and I bid you never forget that.

[catherinesboleyn]

Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I / Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn

Elizabeth (1998) / The Tudors (2007)

[elephantlovemedleys]

FIREBRAND (2024) dir. Karim Aïnouz

[haaam-guuuurl]

[besotted-with-austen]

Lady Catherine de Bourgh: *ranting*-you, my nephew, the son of my sister, with Miss Eliza Bennet! The gall of that girl and her family to spread rumours about you, they really do not understand what it would mean for our family's name! And she did not even blink when I went to confront her! She will not let it go, she will not be persuaded to forget you! Oh, thankfully Mr Collins made me aware of what she was plotting, or I would have been the last to know that she wanted to marry you!

Fitzwilliam Darcy: *flabbergasted* what?

Anne de Bourgh: second-last, I guess.

[bothersomedirtchild]

Local spooky menaces

Ref under the cut!

[periodcostumefantasylover]

Perioddrama Appreciation Week

Day 1: Favorite Tv Show: The Tudors

[hookedwayfinders]

This photo is extremely Alicent with Helaena coded

[baubeautyandthegeek]

Divine Intervention - Elizabeth Woodville/Anne Beauchamp Neville

A/N: Day 27 for @sapphic-september , a bonus fic.

“Your Grace you cannot mean….” “I do.” Elizabeth’s lips brush her ear even as Anne trembles at her touch. She should not be here, she thinks, she should not do this… even as she thinks it she leans to her Queen’s touch, barely biting back the soft sound of terror when her husband pushes into the room, Elizabeth moves swiftly, tucking Anne behind her and raising a small knife to block his approach. “Stop.” Edward follows, his gaze dark as he takes in the room, Anne’s clearly trembling hand on Elizabeth’s waist, Elizabeth’s eyes ablaze with anger, his voice low. “How badly…” “She is mine, Edward. I claim the divine right.” “Cousin… what have you done?” Edward pulls Warwick from the room, Elizabeth’s eyes glitter as she moves to the door, calling Edward back, her voice low, husked with anger. “I want his head Edward, he harmed her… truly. Who is to say he won’t harm his children too.” He stares at her and she scoffs, her voice low. “Their blood is on your hands then…” She turns away, crossing to take Anne’s hand in her own, leading her from the room she had been using to tend to the woman, leading her safely to her own private rooms, shutting them safely away to kiss the other woman, her voice soft and light. “There now…. Safe at last, my fair Anne…”

[thomascromwelll]

Queen Anne Boleyn and Princess Elizabeth Tudor in The Tudors (2007-2010) Season two, episode seven | 'Matters of State'

[laurapetrie]

Queen Victoria's sketches of Anne Boleyn after seeing Giulia Grisi in Donizetti's Anna Bolena, 1830s.

[catherinesboleyn]

Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I / Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn

Elizabeth (1998) / The Tudors (2008)

[cesareeborgia]

↳ house woodville & house boleyn + parallels (requested by anonymous)

[eobard-thawne]

FAVORITE SCENES FROM BECOMING ELIZABETH: 4/∞ "You look beautiful. Show me. Oh, ready for this party and ready before me. Beauty really is wasted on the young. You don't use it or believe it, and then just when you start to, it disappears. But it leaves the vanity behind, for the sake of irony, probably."