Tumblr crosspost (4 February 2021)

I have a longer post in drafts about it, but … one of the things I really enjoy about Austen is that she doesn’t hold back judgment of her characters or even altogether deny them agency (though her fandom sometimes does!), but she also frequently goes out of her way to highlight the experiences that have influenced their development into who they are.

Especially (though not exclusively) when it comes to her main characters, her good people aren’t good because they just had the innate moral fortitude to shrug off their upbringings or the things that have happened to them, which seems to be a lot of people’s idea of goodness. Austen main characters are good people and they’re impacted by their experiences and have qualities (often flaws) that clearly arise more out of upbringing than any essential underlying characteristic. Goodness isn’t just about super-resilience, but neither is experience wholly defining.

It’s not at all restricted to Austen, of course, but even now (…particularly now), it’s so refreshing.

Tagged: #i'm so tired of the resilience narrative or blank slate narrative #and i was thinking of how elizabeth/darcy is one of comparatively few ships i'm really into where the characters #are just about squeaky clean—and i think part of it (aside of their general magnificence lol) is it's not a magic resilience thing at all #she is extremely clear about the ways in which they have been influenced—mostly for the worse—by their experiences #they're allowed to be good AND to be affected by their lives in natural ways #shouldn't be as refreshing as it is but it's one of the things i keep going back for

[ETA 4/30/2024: I was also thinking about Mr Collins, of all people—Austen doesn't justify him in any way, obviously, but also doesn't try to pretend that his upbringing and history aren't what made him who he is. The effects of education, upbringing, and general history on people's characters and morals are a constant preoccupation of her books, IMO.]

Tumblr crosspost (5 February 2021)

An anon asked:

I feel like you've probably been asked this before, but which Austen novel do you most recommend? (I've read p&p and really loved it!)

I replied:

My favorite after P&P is Mansfield Park, but a lot of people bounce pretty hard off of it. It’s longer, more sober, much less classically romantic (I ship the heroine and her rival muuuuch more than the main canon couple), and often considered morally messy.

If that’s not your thing, you might want to try Persuasion. It was written towards the end of Austen’s life in the later 1810s, whereas P&P was first written in the mid-1790s, so it’s very different in some ways. It definitely engages with a changing world where P&P really belongs to an earlier era. But it’s interesting, and IMO very touching in its own right.

heckofabecca said:

my 3 favs <3

Tumblr crosspost (5 February 2021)

An anon said:

I keep wondering about this: How/When do you think Darcy and Wickham's friendship ended? A slow disintegration? A sudden realisation. Did it happen at school? At University? How much time did they spend together? I suspect that how audiences interpret this has a big impact on how they see their characters...

I replied:

It’s possible!

Darcy says that he was exposed to Wickham’s real character as a young man, many, many years earlier, which is vague, but gives us a general idea.

It’s worth mentioning that Darcy is also introduced as a “young man” in the present, so his idea of “many, many years” might not be as vast as it sounds. At any rate, this certainly suggests (or states, rather) that he was an adult when he realized what Wickham was, while his father didn't reach the same realization. That gives us another point on the timeline: Mr Darcy was still alive at this point, so Darcy was 23 or younger at the time (making it 5+ years earlier).

To me, it sounds like Wickham went noticeably wrong in early adulthood, not childhood (so not at school), but very early adulthood. It also sounds like they were together pretty often up to that point. Darcy says:

“The vicious propensities—the want of principle, which he [Wickham] was careful to guard from the knowledge of his best friend [Mr Darcy], could not escape the observation of a young man [Darcy] of nearly the same age with himself [Wickham], and who had opportunities of seeing him in unguarded moments.”

So Darcy and Wickham were around each other enough that Darcy considers his observation of Wickham’s true character to have been inevitable, and their estrangement seems to have followed that. My impression is that they were good friends up to around 20, hung out a lot for a time, but that Wickham soon went down a path that Darcy couldn’t follow or accept. It doesn’t sound like it happened all at once to me, to give Darcy chances to see Wickham’s unguarded moments for some unknown length of time, but it also doesn’t sound all that gradual; Darcy seems to have had a clear (and disapproving) idea of what he was seeing.

At the same time, he kept the whole thing secret from his father—perhaps because Mr Darcy was likely in poor health by then, or because he privately hoped it was a phase (even after this point, he “wished” to believe Wickham was sincere about turning his life around), or some other reason. That’s speculation, but I think we do have a rough timeline for when the estrangement happened.

 

 Tagged: #short version: they must have been young men at the time but also under 23 #so not kids but quite young #anghraine's headcanons #a little!

Tumblr crosspost (6 February 2021)

There’s a    ton I need   to do,           so obviously  this is the       point at which my  space bar    starts sticking.

bramblebreath said:

Dude I thought this was a blackout poem until the last 4 words.

tree said:

i came here to say that someone's going to look at this and declare it a poem but i see i've been anticipated. *innocent whistling*

[ETA 4/30/2024: This somehow got 28 reblogs, which isn't a ton, but was certainly baffling in the context of my extremely trivial post. However, the whole Internet past time of telling people "I thought you meant X until I read further and realized you meant Y" is something I find baffling, so.]

Tumblr crosspost (6 February 2021)

So I gave up on my keyboard, went to sleep, woke up again, and the space bar had magically stopped sticking…? I’d think it was a figment of my imagination if I hadn’t posted about it. IDEK.

Unrelatedly: it’s weird, because I’m an irritable person in general and you’d think I’d get used to it, but being seriously annoyed is such an unpleasant feeling. Especially when it’s over something that doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things, it was just kind of inconsiderate. :\

[ETA 4/30/2024: I have no idea what I was talking about here, but I'm not usually this vague, so I'm guessing I was pretty upset but unwilling to directly implicate anyone in public.]