An anon said:

Just stumbled across your Darcy/Emma fic which was delightful, and I can't help wondering what Knightley would think of their relationship, and what Darcy would think of Knightley? Would love to hear any of your headcanons for this!

I replied:

Oh, thank you! It’s an old one, but was fun to come up with and write.

I think it’d be very difficult for Mr Knightley. In part, there’s his general love for Emma, which naturally would make the whole thing painful, but I think Darcy’s character would also make it complicated.

On the one hand, Darcy is very respectable and upstanding, in ways that I think Mr Knightley would value, and to some extent, Darcy could be a good influence on Emma (he’s more deliberate, more disciplined). But on the other, they share quite a few faults and would probably only exacerbate them in each other, which would be painful to watch even for the limited duration of Mr Woodhouse’s lifetime.

And then they’re gone for just about forever. I imagine there would certainly be an amount of resentment and disapproval of Darcy mixed in with general respect—it’d be hard.

As for Darcy, I think he would be largely oblivious to all this, or at least fairly indifferent. Mr Knightley isn’t the sort of person he’s usually drawn to (who seem to be lively, outgoing types), but at the same time, is very much the sort of person he’d respect IMO. So he thinks well of him, but without a lot of interest in him—if they’re thrown into company together, he’s happy enough to talk with him, but he doesn’t go out of his way to seek him out or anything like that. He mostly thinks about him in relation to Emma.

After they leave for Pemberley, I doubt he’d think much about him at all.

Tagged: #this is probably not the most exciting answer #but is what i envision there!

This has nothing to do with the last post per se, but one of my favourite things about imagining the characters of different Austen novels encountering each other is taking account of when the different books were written rather than making them immediate contemporaries. It’s not better, it’s just super entertaining to me personally.

Like, people talk about what, say, Elizabeth would think of Emma—but Elizabeth was invented in 1796 and Emma in 1814. How does Emma come across to a nearly forty-year-old Elizabeth Darcy? 1815 sees the events of Persuasion resolved in Bath. If the Tilneys are also in Bath, what would Catherine (created in 1798), think of Anne Elliot, some seven years her junior? Does Marianne Dashwood (who first emerged around 1795), sympathize with Fanny Price (created ~1813)?

I don’t know, but it’s fun to consider!

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An anon said:

Google just shared an article from scholar Barbara Z. Thaden, arguing the real heroine of “Emma” is Jane Fairfax, that Emma is never supposed to be a sympathetic character, and that “our job as readers is to resist Emma’s charm.” Would you agree with that interpretation?

I replied:

Hell no.

It’s honestly hard to say much else beyond that. If that scenario were true, Jane would be extremely underwritten, and the novel would become both very didactic for Austen and a failure as such. It’s pretty ??????? to me.

(tbh I turned off the Google article sharing function awhile back, specifically because I kept getting terribad Austen articles.)

I'm much more concerned about my meta than my fic, tbh.

But Tumblr drama aside, one of my favourite Austen details is this:

“Mr Wentworth was nobody, I remember; quite unconnected; nothing to do with the Strafford family.”

This is Sir Walter Elliot’s dismissal of the Wentworths’ claim to genteel status, but also so much more. See, “the Strafford family” were 100% real.

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Over at Tumblr, I've sort of-kind of been keeping up with it, on-again off-again, since I finished school. So!

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I was recently reminded that I'd only posted one of these! So, um, here's number two.

A note on the timeline: Part 2, unlike Part 1, goes AU well before the beginning of either any of the novels.  Darcy is twenty or twenty-one.

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