#austen anon

[citrinesparkles]

citrine!!! it's austen anon stopping by to say that they are extremely late to the party and have just now watched the queen charlotte series!! i wanted to ask if you had seen it yet and your thoughts if so (because i have MANY).

AUSTEN ANONNNN my beloved HELLO <3

OOOOO i have not actually!!! but ive gotten some of the plot from a good friend of mine and i've heard it's just the bee's knees. from what few clips i HAVE seen + her summaries it looks like it could be very good!! i think it could be a really interesting look into relationships and how they're impacted by mental illness and how people might choose to navigate that, which i think is very interesting. (plus, both the leads seem INCREDIBLY compelling!)

i may get around to it someday! i've been catching up on a lot of media lately so who knows 🧐

im trying to work through my comics backlog at the moment and get back into reading (im most of the way through a novel As We Speak 😤and im very proud- it's a star trek novel, but it still counts, okay?)

i hope you're doing well, lovely <3 <3 <3 <3 im sending you the world's biggest hug rn MWAH

[bethanydelleman]

I think the asker of this question really doesn't get Jane Austen. I sincerely believe that one of Austen's main points is that the way women are judged as candidates for marriage is ridiculous and unlikely to bring happiness.

How realistic Pride and Prejudice really is? I mean, it's very well written, but I have a hard time taking the love part of the story seriously when I know that in real life, there would be 0.0000000000001% chance of a man of Darcy's calibre in that era proposing to a poor, average looking and unaccomplished young lady like Lizzy.

Let's pretend that does actually describe Elizabeth

Beauty? It failed Mr. Bennet

Wealth? What did that get Mrs. Bennet? She's hardly happy. Can you imagine what kind of marriage Mr. Darcy would have with Anne de Bourgh? Is there a snowball's chance in hell that he'd be happy and fulfilled in that relationship?

Accomplishments? You mean the thing that Caroline Bingley has? That any girl can acquire as long as you throw her in a prestigious enough school? Something that is wielded by most as a mere tool to secure a good marriage but rarely loved in it's own merit? What is that worth?

The value of Elizabeth Bennet is her intellectual compatibility with Mr. Darcy. The value of Fanny Price is her deep morality and sincere affection. The value of Anne Elliot is not her bloom that faded but her cultivated mind and her compassion. The value of Elinor Dashwood is her mental strength in the face of adversity. The value of Marianne Dashwood is her ability to love whole-hardheartedly. The value of Catherine Morland is her honesty, candour, and love. The value of Emma Woodhouse is not in her wealth but her determination to rectify her mistakes and her selfless care of her father.

Lady Middleton's pianoforte sits untouched since her accomplishments secured her a baronet; Willoughby finds wealth cannot fully compensate for the lack of love; and beauty is ephemeral. Those were never good criteria for securing lasting happiness and Jane Austen knew it and said it!

[anghraine]

what happens to charlotte lucas if mr. collins dies early (before he inherits longbourne)?

That is the worst possible scenario for her, basically.

Mr Collins's living with regard to Hunsford only lasts for the duration of his life, so she gets nothing from it. Unless her child (she's implied to be pregnant at the end of P&P) is a son and, iirc, falls within a set number of generations as laid out by the original entailment, she also gets nothing with regard to Longbourn (and if the child is a girl, she now has another dependent to worry about and provide for; I think Mr Bennet's daughters would receive preference over Charlotte's if Mr Collins never inherits and there's no son).

There would have been legal documents accompanying their betrothal that laid out exactly how much property or money Charlotte and her potential children would receive during and after the marriage (this is what is meant by references to pin money and jointure; pin money is what the woman will regularly receive for her private expenses during the marriage, and jointure is what she gets if she survives her husband). There's a straightforward example of this with Mr and Mrs Bennet, for instance.

Mrs Bennet brought a dowry of four thousand pounds to the marriage. Mr Bennet or his family settled an additional one thousand pounds on her at the time (23 years earlier). So there's five thousand pounds attached to Mrs Bennet and her children specifically that is essentially secure—the income from it can only go to her or her children. Since her children are all daughters, however, this pretty much automatically includes her daughters' husbands as well, since women were legally and financially subsumed into their husbands' identities upon marriage and it took some legal shenanigans to protect their resources. Lydia's share of Mrs Bennet's fortune, one thousand pounds, effectively goes to Wickham as part of the marriage arrangements, and it's not clear if Lydia's money is legally secured to her in the same way since it was part of bribing Wickham to marry her at all.

(Tangent: a lot of analysis tends to assume that income from a lump sum of this kind would generate an income of 5% of the principal via low-risk, low-reward government investments. Mr Collins himself explicitly estimates that Elizabeth's portion of Mrs Bennet's settlement would generate an income at a 4% rate, leaving her with a mere 40 pounds a-year. This might seem Mr Collins-style negging, but in reality these kinds of safe government investments could and did drop to rates closer to 3% due to various economic upheavals at the time.)

Returning to Charlotte's situation, eighteenth-century advice urged men (even much less affluent men) to set aside a significant portion of their incomes every year to add to what was settled on their wives/children, so that if they died, their children and widows would have more to live on. The original settlement, as in Mrs Bennet's case, could be pretty small, especially for multiple people to live on. Mr Collins is enough of a rules guy that he might set aside the suggested percentages of his income, especially if Lady Catherine considers it proper. But even if we assume he's setting aside, say, 20% of his income, I doubt that would amount to very much if he dies soon; the Hunsford living is good, but not that good, and he's only 25, so there just hasn't been much time. Charlotte would essentially be a poor cousin by marriage of the Bennets and dependent on her own family (already in straitened circumstances) for anything more than her settlement, which given the circumstances wouldn't amount to much.

People often kill Mr Collins young to given Charlotte a chance at a better life, but in reality, this would likely be a disaster for her.

[bennetsbonnet]

Why don't you agree with the "enemies to lovers trope"? For Elizabeth at least, Darcy, after insulting her, surely was her enemy.

Personally, I don't really enjoy the tropification of literature and reducing stories down to a few buzz words because, in doing so, the context of the era in which the novels were written in is ignored and the complexity of each character is downplayed. I don't think it's the worst offence in the world by any means, I guess if you're recommending it to a friend who likes that trope then it makes sense to push it, but I find it hard to think of Elizabeth and Mr Darcy as enemies (and I also wonder if the friend would be disappointed because it might not truly be enemies to lovers).

I can see why some might think of Pride and Prejudice as enemies to lovers, perhaps especially first-time readers who focus on Elizabeth's perspective of Mr Darcy, as the narrative does because that's all the information we have to go off when forming our opinion of his character, but I think that once you know his character and see how hard he was trying with her, it's a struggle to think of him as ever viewing Elizabeth as an enemy.

You're right that Elizabeth did perceive Darcy negatively, especially after he insulted her, but is that enough for enemies? He was rude and she was rightly furious and understandably thought the worst of him but I'm not sure based off that one interaction, it warrants Darcy being deemed her enemy.

I also don't think that's the core of their dynamic. Elizabeth was subconsciously interested in him, she enjoyed conversing with him and provoking him; she looked for any sign of his features in Lady Catherine's face when she met her and she also passed judgment on Anne de Bourgh, who she believed would be Darcy's future wife... she remembered one vague comment off Wickham about Anne and it clearly stuck in her mind for months. Darcy was living there rent free!

From Darcy's perspective, Elizabeth was never his enemy. Her situation in life was his enemy perhaps... but Elizabeth herself? I don't think so! Once he spent even a small amount of time with her, he was smitten. I also think that depicting Mr Darcy as merely an enemy to a lover does a disservice to his growth because he was never inherently a bad man worthy of being viewed of as an enemy, as evidenced by the many good accounts of him that we hear, he just needed to be humbled and change his ways. That doesn't scream bad boy or enemy to me.

Finally, I can't see either of them being happy with someone they had ever deemed an enemy, not with how much Elizabeth values good manners and Darcy's strong moral code. He was being conceited when he said it, but I believe Mr Darcy was sincere when he said, 'my good opinion once lost, is lost forever.' I don't think he's a man capable of enemies to lovers!

[linusbenjamin]

Jack. This place is crazy. It's just... I can't... It's driving me nuts.

[literatureloverx]

What are your favorite books?

(Also i'm the anon that requested that chuuya dazai dynamic analysis :3 great work btw. And could I take the '🎪' as my emoji?)

Of course, 🎪-anon!❤️ I actually have many "favorites," but Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment tops the list for me—at least for now. I can rank some others for you, though.

I should note that I haven't read The Brothers Karamazov and Demons yet, so there’s a high possibility that my list will change once I’ve read them. (Apparently, The Brothers Karamazov is even better than Crime and Punishment? We’ll see.)

1. Crime and Punishment (I just love it so, so much. No words needed. It changed my life.)

2. The Idiot (The book might seem boring, but it parallels a perfect Christian man with a pure soul against an impure world. [Prince Myshkin is literally me.])

3. White Nights (It broke my heart, and it’s melancholically beautiful.)

4. The Children of Hurin (Tolkien is obviously a Fi-Ne user, which makes his works a little confusing and structured in an unstructured way, which is tolerable for me. There are many things that are simply there just because, without explanation, so one can try to find the meaning behind them. My favorite aspect of the book was the Curse of Túrin.)

5. Anna Karenina (This book seems boring at first too, but there are some very good quotes and situations one can learn from.)

6. Pride and Prejudice (The OG enemies-to-lovers story—I like Jane Austen's delivery.)

7. The Crocodile (This is one of Dostoevsky's short stories, but it’s not as well-known as White Nights. It made me chuckle now and then, and it’s truly an admirable work.)

[jewishbarbies]

I feel like she chose the 1830s in her song to sound cultured or educated. That or it’s like those privileged white girls who fantasize about the 1950s because they’ve bought into the narrative of being a perfect peak feminine woman taken care of a man while ignoring the fact that they literally would’ve been seen as their husband’s property 💀

definitely said the quiet part out loud with that lyric 💀

[frikatilhi]

i miss the person i was before the first story 😪

I know, we were all so used to being just another sad bojere bitch with no money, no prospects, already a burden to our parents, but at least we knew what the world expected of us

And look at us now, lost and confused, no idea how to navigate in this world

[marzipanandminutiae]

Is there any time travel fiction you enjoy? If so, do you have any recommendations?

I really like The Jane Austen Project, which is about a doctor who goes back in time to recover one of Jane Austen’s lost manuscripts and figure out what killed her. The time travel aspect is very good since the Regency parts are scrupulously researched, and it features a time traveling character who actually has done research and prepared (so very little secondhand embarrassment).

But what I really love about it is that the main character comes from the world in which climate change has ramped up to an extreme degree, but people are still living happy, fulfilled lives. The environmental consequences are mentioned, and they are implied to have been devastating to the world as we know it today – the “present” world of the novel is very different and in many ways worse. But humanity has not completely collapsed, and therefore I find it to be a hopeful take on the subject. Even though most of the book is set in Regency England.

[citrinesparkles]

citrine!! currently sending you a belated congratulations on your graduation! that's so exciting and such a huge accomplishment!!

and yeah the weather has brought me a lot of melancholy and nostalgia. there's been lots of mourning for my teenage years and a yearning for large bodies of water!!

i feel like such a fraud for not having watched the new little women adaptation--but i just haven't gotten around to it!! everyone always recommends it but now it feels like an assignment and my brain keeps procrastinating it... but now after hearing how emotional it made you maybe i'll finally sit down and just watch it.

have you ever watched the movie stuck in love? i feel like that's something that you'd enjoy a lot!!

because my mood has felt really stuck as of late, i feel like my music habits have been very cyclical. i've been listening to a lot of mitski which feels like a staple for the genre, turnover (specifically "take my head" and "cutting my fingers off"), faye webster, and panic! at the disco but ONLY a fever you can't sweat out

-austen anon ♡

thank you so much, honey <3

GOD. MOOD. oh i miss the water every day!!! every day. i grew up in an area with lots and lots of water and there is nothing better for a moody day- or a happy day, tbh.

if you do watch little women, i hope you enjoy it!! i really did have a blast. (i will say tho, i am Not known for having good taste in movies. me enjoying something is not an indication of quality i assure you HJSFKHDSKJ)

i have not! :0 i will add it to my-watch list, which is. extremely long and ever-growing, smh.

MITSKIIII <3 my beloved. she's so talented omg. i hadn't heard of turnover before, but i love both of those tracks!!! definitely will be adding them to my rotation <3

faye webster is also relatively new to me- i'd only ever heard "right side of my neck"! will definitely be digging through more of her discography now, thank you for the recommendation :)

ah, a fever you can't sweat out. anthems of youth <3

they're a little slow, but you might like i only wanna talk to you by the maine, and while you were sleeping by annahstasia and raveena.

a slightly more upbeat song (that just soothes me right down to my bones!) that i think might appeal to you would be fascination by tamino!

anyway i hope you're feeling a little brighter, sweetheart- sending lots of good vibes your way <3

[bethanydelleman]

there needs to be a study on why people who want to make adaptations about p&p always somehow imprint on mary. like wouldn't kitty be easier if they just want a self insert? ig they think of her as the underdog of pride and prejudice (?)

I think it's fairly easy to explain, a shallow understanding of Mary Bennet is that she's an underappreciated bookworm/ugly duckling. Kitty Bennet, who is basically a blank slate, doesn't have enough personality for someone to identify with her.

What I don't think the casual reader or viewer grasps is that Mary Bennet is pedantic, self-righteous, callous, and downright annoying. And listen, I know she's a teenager, most teenagers improve over time, but the Mary presented in the novel is not someone I'm dying to be friends with or someone who I view as an underdog. She doesn't care about her sisters, not when they are sick or ruined; she isn't isolated by her siblings, she isolates herself; and she is very much promoting herself as Not Like Other Girls.

I don't find her unsympathetic, because I do think that she's the way she is because her intelligent father gives her no guidance and her mother points out her plain looks often, making her search for something else to distinguish herself, but I do think she'd need some reforming to be a palatable character to me. A lot of fan fiction writers just have her turn into a second Elizabeth once she finally has a chance to "come out of her shell", which I don't think is justified by the text. She's already out of her shell, it's not pretty.

But in the end, it's fine. I might not want to read those kind of stories, but I have no problem with people writing them. They just aren't for me. I just hope the writer knows that they are writing out of character.

[anghraine]

hi sorry if this is a silly question but is lizzie in pride and prejudice canonically pretty? i know she's not as pretty as jane, who is very beautiful, but she's described as bright-eyed and having a pleasing figure i think, but darcy at the very beginning says she's not handsome enough to tempt him (lol) right? was he 100% being a snob or is she really just "cute" but not really pretty? thanks :]

No problem!

Elizabeth is canonically pretty. She's generally considered the second most attractive of the Bennet sisters, all of whom are narratively described as pretty/handsome except Mary. Elizabeth is described as "Mrs Collins's pretty friend" and even Darcy himself very quickly realizes that she's attractive. She's not a striking classic beauty like Jane (or Darcy himself!), but she's good-looking enough.

I think Darcy's initial insult sometimes gets weighted a bit too heavily in discussions of Elizabeth's canonical appearance, tbh. Only a few scenes later, he admits that he never dances at all when he can avoid it. He particularly dislikes dancing with strangers. He's in a bad mood. And he's already a fish out of water in Meryton, a backwater village he's never been to before when he's used to far more elite and/or urban environments. He's behaving poorly that night, but IMO it's a perfect storm of factors that have almost nothing to do with Elizabeth at first. She could have been Jane's identical twin and he'd have still come up with a reason to be an asshole about it.

In fact, Darcy shows no interest in dancing with Jane either despite his mention of her; he doesn't actually want to dance with anyone, and the only reason Elizabeth comes up at all is because Bingley brings her up. I think Darcy's annoyance is primarily with Bingley, rather than Elizabeth. In Darcy's view, Bingley immediately pursues the only vaguely high status woman in the room and then publicly tries to peer pressure Darcy—who he's got to know hates dancing and who admits to being in a poor frame of mind—into dancing with a much less attractive reject.

In the moment, the whole thing reads to Darcy as just kind of insulting. He's lashing out at Bingley to make that clear and to get him to back off. I suspect he realizes it was shitty and his private insistence that Elizabeth is objectively undesirable is a weak attempt to justify his behavior.

Elizabeth isn't strikingly beautiful or anything, but Darcy's main priority is defending himself. It doesn't seem to take more than a few days for him to decide Elizabeth is actually pretty and cool and charming; he was just too annoyed to see past her unconventionality initially. He finds this deeply embarrassing (not the only thing he should!), but he was never being objective about Elizabeth's appearance. He just didn't want to dance with a stranger and was aggravated with Bingley.

[bennetsbonnet]

Thoughts on a Elizabeth Bennet/Frederick Wentworth marriage?

Ooooh very intriguing proposition, thanks for raising it!

Personally I don't seriously want to imagine Elizabeth or Wentworth being unable to be with their respective beloveds because that's far too painful! But I'll entertain it as a hypothetical as I do think it's interesting to consider it.

To begin with, I think a factor that would have a big impact on the likelihood of such a marriage succeeding depends on whether their ages remain the same as they do in their respective canons or not. Wentworth is approximately a decade older than Elizabeth at the time Persuasion is set. Though I think Elizabeth is reasonably sensible for her age, she is still obviously liable to making mistakes due to her youth, as illustrated by her misplaced pride in her ability to read others' characters, which results in her harsh judgement of Mr Darcy. Not to say that I think this would be insurmountable, I think Wentworth is a patient man, but he values Anne's maturity. Though I do think Elizabeth is far more mature than Louisa, Wentworth ultimately did not want to marry a woman so much younger than himself.

As for factors in their favour, I do think Elizabeth would be attracted to Wentworth for a variety of reasons. He's honourable, as shown in the way he is prepared to honour any potential attachment he may have inadvertently made with Louisa due to his actions; he's emotionally intelligent, as demonstrated by the kindness he shows to Mrs Musgrove regarding her son when, rather than telling her the cold, hard truth that he was a terrible sailor, he tells a comforting lie; he's clearly a great writer of letters, as we see at the end, and I think Elizabeth would appreciate that.

Likewise, Wentworth would enjoy Elizabeth's vivacity and lively spirit. She is more outgoing than Anne and unlikely to be easily (or ever) persuaded, as evidenced by her refusal to marry Mr Collins, which Wentworth would value. I know that Wentworth does realise he was too harsh in his judgment of Anne, and he ultimately comes to understand the reasoning behind her decision to break off their engagement. But could Elizabeth and Wentworth be too similar in that respect? One of my favourite aspects of both couples is the way the confident Elizabeth and Wentworth both balance out their more thoughtful and introverted counterparts. Still, there are so many attractive qualities that Elizabeth possesses; her wit and humour would draw anyone in, I think. Plus, he would undoubtedly enjoy her piano playing and singing, and her fine, dark eyes... as others have done before him.

Wentworth, too, has that same wonderful quality as Darcy, in his ability to reflect on his actions, realise he was wrong and modify his behaviour. The concept of a man who is aware of his shortcomings and mistakes... truly tantalising. He obviously possesses that same 'skill' as Elizabeth in observing people and understanding their characters, which is what made him such a successful captain (and perhaps illustrates he can do so more successfully than Elizabeth)! Managing a group of rowdy sailors would have been no mean feat and the fact Wentworth has such a high reputation proves that he was able to quickly understand what made his men tick and bring the best out in them.

Also, happy to be corrected on this (as I do not know either Wentworth or Persuasion nearly as well as I do Pride and Prejudice) but I cannot recall a conversation that reminds me of the way Darcy and Elizabeth have their little debates. As stated above, I think Wentworth is intelligent, but perhaps in a different way to Darcy, who was able to have these quick verbal spars with Elizabeth. Plus, Darcy would likely have had the superior education of the two (cannot remember anything about Wentworth's but again, happy to be corrected!) given that he went to university. Of course, I don't think that automatically makes a person more intelligent but it's something to consider when accounting for the differences between Wentworth and Darcy!

Ultimately, I think I could see it working if they met when they were both of a similar age, more akin to the dynamic between Wentworth and Anne at the beginning of Persuasion. I think both Elizabeth and Captain Wentworth possess traits that the other would value, though they are perhaps far more similar in disposition than not, which isn't necessarily a mark against them, but they both end up with partners who are quite different in that respect and may have better balanced their personalities.

One thing is for certain, though; if a man in uniform with a fortune of twenty five thousand pounds came to court one of her daughters, Mrs Bennet would have such tremblings, flutterings, and such beatings of her heart, that she would get no rest by night nor by day, and all of Meryton would know about it posthaste...

[amethvysts]

alguma possibilidade de fazer headcanons de bridgerton com o cast de lsdln??

pior que eu não sei te dizer diva kkk eu já iniciei uns headcanons sobre lsdln!príncipes da disney, e não tem muita fantasia, então eu acho que é quase a mesma vibe. pretendo também fazer alguns sobre enzo!principe, mas com uma pegada mais moderna

[petercaths]

I’m really curious what your thoughts are on Skate?

I thought some of their lighter scenes were cute, and that the actors had great chemistry. But I didn’t really buy the “unspoken” connection between them. I thought a lot of their writing revolved around them being outlaws, but their characters are soooooo much more than that, so that connection felt very thin and flimsy to me. I didn’t really buy them as mirrors either, I think Kate and Sawyer— at their core—are very different people with very different priorities and values.

I love the episode “What Kate Did”, it’s my favorite episode of season 2. But I thought the “you remind me of Wayne…” thing was unearned, and also never really brought up again so kinda useless too?

I think the episodes I liked them in the most was in s1, when they’re bonding while camping out, and the whole “I think you wanted to spend time with me because I’m the only other person here who doesn’t belong.” That’s the kind of thing I can buy within their dynamic, because I can believe that Kate feels that way. And if I had to summarize Skate, that would be the tag line.

I believe that Kate believes that she’s similar to Sawyer. And so she retreats to him like a safe space, because this is the territory she’s needed to adapt to in order to survive. But I think what we’re shown is that the habitat under which Sawyer lives, is never one in which Kate feels at home in.

But yeah. Even with that though, I was pretty indifferent to them. I think the only time I had a strong genuine (negative) reaction was in season 5. But that had more to do with how reiterating Skate really fucked over Kate’s character, and retconned a few things that were canon and important to Kate and Sawyers individual development (such as Kate intending to leave Sawyer on the island, the reason Sawyer jumped off the chopper, and most importantly the reason Kate wanted to keep Aaron. I’m literally ready to set these writers aflame 20 years later for making Aaron about Sawyer).

Anyways, I’m the type of person who needs to be invested in both characters for a ship to work, and I was pretty indifferent to Sawyer as a character. As a result, I was pretty indifferent to Skate too (and Suliet as an extension).

[missielynne]

Favorite and least favorite Jane Austen novels and adaptations? I was psyched to see you reblog Northanger Abbey :)

Favorite novels:

Northanger Abbey (obvs)

Sense and Sensibility

Mansfield Park

Emma

Least favorite novels

Pride and Prejudice (because I grew up around so many people that LOVE it and it wore me out)

Adaptations

Favorite:

1995 P and P (it's more enjoyable when I can hear how the lines are said because I especially have trouble figuring out when things are funny when I'm just reading it on my own.)

Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility

2007 Northanger Abbey

And I am also counting Clueless and Bridget Jones as adaptations that I love.

Least favorite

2005 P and P

Netflix Persuasion

The Emma with Gwenyth Paltrow