anghraine

salazarastark on Tumblr asked:

So I'm going through your Austen tags and I really love it. It seems like you're articulating things that I've never been able too, or making me think of things I never would have. I have a couple questions that I love to see your response to, but I either can't seem to find them or you don't have them answered. If you don't mind, what are your opinions on a.) when the novels take place and b.) what the heroines would think of each other?

Thank you very much!

On the purely prosaic level, I would say that the three early novels (NA, S&S, P&P) are all rooted in the time of their composition, the mid- to late-1790s. The cultural references and details skew heavily to the eighteenth century, and I think the preoccupations do as well, like the cult of sensibility, the picturesque, the heated debate over the value of modern vs classic literature/art that animated so much 18th cent discourse in the arts, etc.

At the same time, we know that Austen did her best to adapt them to contemporary audiences—she didn’t want her novels to seem “dated” (at the time, but being popular 200 years later would undoubtedly please her!). That’s why NA was such a problem novel for her; it’s so heavily structured around and filled with specific details of the time that it couldn’t be modernized in the way she sort of managed with P&P and S&S, and she gave up on making it work, at least temporarily.

But she only sort of managed it with P&P and S&S. The Regency cultural referents in the later novels are just … not there in the early ones. The characters are reading eighteenth century texts and wearing 1790s clothes/hairstyles and engaging in 1790s discourse. I think the world that the earlier novels’ characters move within is a much more stable place; IMO the latter ones evoke a much stronger sense of a changing and uncertain world.

So, going into the stories themselves, I definitely envision the first three as taking place in the 1790s, and the latter three (three and a half, rather) in the 1810s. By internal dating/references, P&P would take place in 1795-1796, and though I disagree w/ Ellen Moody’s dating there (…and with her about P&P generally), her dating of S&S in 1797-1798 seems reasonable. NA would be 1798. Emma would be somewhere around 1813/1814. Persuasion is canonically 1814-1815. MP feels rather like a bridge between the two groups; I lean towards something in the area of 1809 or so, but it could be a few years earlier.

The varying timelines makes the question of what the heroines would think of each other particularly interesting, I think. I imagine that a forty-year-old Elizabeth Darcy seeing Persuasion’s ending drama in Bath would find it all a bit sweet and a bit ridiculous; I think she’d like Anne, who is similar to both Jane and Darcy in some ways, though disapprove in some ways. Twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth meeting Catherine just after NA …? I imagine Catherine would be admiring and a little intimidated, Elizabeth perhaps charmed and definitely amused.

But then, if it was an older Catherine meeting Anne instead of Elizabeth, that’s a different dynamic. Quieter—I feel like Anne would appreciate Catherine’s kindness and lack of judgment alongside a certain liveliness, while Catherine would have a lot of sympathy and respect for her.

I think Emma and Fanny might well dislike each other, and that Emma and Elizabeth would probably clash before getting on like a house on fire. Elizabeth would have no patience for Marianne, but I think Fanny’s romantic and quietly melodramatic side would click with an older Marianne and they could end up unexpectedly close (I kind of love the idea of Marianne as an older mentor to Fanny???). Elinor would like Fanny, too (look at who she’s married to :P), probably be a bit aloof from Emma, approve of Anne. She might be a little stiff for Elizabeth (…but look at who she’s married to). Alternately, I can see them getting on really well in an understated way.

And … well, there are a lot of potential combinations here. But that’s the general shape of it for me.