Anghraine

An anon asked:

Based on your family trees, who is Darcy close to, on both sides of his family?

I replied:

Okay, it is very cool to be asked—thank you, anon. And I needed a break from exam stress, so … here we go with the Fitzwilliams. I’ll do a separate one for the Darcys.

The short version: Colonel Fitzwilliam, Lord Rochford, Lady Mary, and Lord Ravenshaw.

The long and rambly version:

In reference to this meme, rain-sleet-snow said:

I'm curious about Philadelphia!

I replied:

So, once upon a time, I wrote a P&P AU that basically re-tells the whole story, but with m!Elizabeth and f!Darcy. The main appeal for me personally was f!Darcy, though, and while that one stuck pretty firmly to the P&P rails, I couldn’t help thinking of a more ‘what-if’ style AU where Darcy is the only genderbent one. Darcy/Elizabeth femslash!

The doc is called ‘Philadelphia’ because I was trying to think of a feminine name that began with the Fi- sound but also had L’s in it, and thought of either Philippa or Philadelphia—I chose the latter because it sounded more pretentious to me, lol, and because it was a name used repeatedly in Austen’s own family. Here's an excerpt:

To be sure, Miss Darcy neither did nor said anything wrong. Her manners, however uninviting, were correct; her appearance was more than correct. Elizabeth had never seen a handsomer woman, except Jane, whom Miss Darcy did not resemble in the slightest. To look at her, in fact, she might have been Lady Catherine’s daughter rather than insipid Miss de Bourgh. Miss Darcy had the same black curls, the same cold dark eyes in a colourless face, the same decided way of carrying herself. 

Elizabeth did not suppose that Lady Catherine had ever been quite as pretty, or as sensible. Miss Darcy spoke well when she deigned to speak at all—but her air of superiority was exactly Lady Catherine’s. The haughty silences would have been, too, if Lady Catherine ever confined herself to silence.

[ETA 3/3/2024: as you might guess, the "Philadelphia" fic was an early iteration of Love, Pride & Delicacy, but I ended up changing a few major things about it: I decided to re-use "Catherine" as f!Darcy's name just because it struck me as so apropos for Lady Anne's and Lady Catherine's daughters, Elizabeth goes from moderately disliking Philadelphia personally but not even remembering that she was supposed to be Wickham's villain to carrying a grudge against Catherine for Wickham's sake, and Philadelphia was implicitly white while Catherine is visibly biracial.]

In response to this post, someone (as usual) suggested that Lady Catherine was basically manufacturing the agreement with Lady Anne about Darcy and younger Anne marrying.

I replied:

When I was in Austen fandom, it was pretty generally assumed that the whole thing was to a greater or lesser extent a figment of Lady Catherine’s imagination.

But the first person we hear about it from is actually Wickham, who is prattling on about his background at Pemberley. He could be making up the expectation of a Darcy/Anne marriage for some reason of his own, of course, but if so, his lie gels with Lady Catherine’s understanding of what happened, even though they both hold each other in contempt. I think it’s more probable that he’s simply repeating what he heard at Pemberley to bolster his bona fides.

I do think there’s often a certain … hm, tendency towards preserving Lady Anne’s character by distancing her from Lady Catherine, even though Lady Anne has almost no character to preserve. We know a) she was a good person, b) she was apparently less benevolent and amiable than her husband, c) with him, she participated in allowing and encouraging Darcy to think himself better than other people, d) her otherwise egotistical sister named her only child after her, and e) Wickham and Lady Catherine believe that Darcy was expected to marry Anne.

It’s all so vague that we can’t know for sure, but personally, I don’t think there’s any reason to suppose Lady Catherine is consciously or unconsciously misrepresenting what happened.

( tags )

Rambling about FI (mostly), ALE (a little), and the one that exists in my head (with a long detour about Darcy and Wickham):

( Read more... )

My au_bigbangs got chosen on the first day! Yay! Now I just need to finish them, ack. Between memes.

( like this one. )

I don't know why, exactly, but I've always had a sneaking fondness for Lady Catherine.  She's overbearing and ridiculous and not terribly bright, but I still like her.  Partly because she is so exactly everything that every conduct book said a woman shouldn't be, aggressive and managing and bossy, and enough force of personality that she gets most people to admire her for it.  Like Emma on crack, only with a lot more staying power.  (I feel reasonably certain that Lady Catherine never loses interest halfway through one of her plans.)  And part of it is because she's so demonised by fandom and academia - she's either aristocratic!Mrs Bennet or still worse.  LawfulEvil!Lady Catherine.

(Tangent - I think she's meant to be reverse!Mr Bennet, actually.  He's the parent who's brilliant but irresponsibly passive; she's the [surrogate] parent who is extremely proactive but so unintelligent that she does it all wrong.  Mrs Bennet is mostly just nervous and selfish and frightened.)

And partly it's because I actually feel rather sorry for her, esp after her icy statement that daughters never matter much to their fathers - it's rather sad, I think (*suspects that Lady Catherine and Lady Anne were not terribly important to Daddy the Earl*).  And even though the idea of planning the marriage of a pair of infants is silly (and was so by then), I still kind of love the image of two sisters leaning over their children's cradles and . . . yeah.  Anyway, I'm pretty much the a card-carrying member of the Lady Catherine Defence Society and I wanted to write something that was both sympathetic and . . . well, Lady Catherine. 

So this is a very long and meandering way of saying:  Lady Catherine fic!

( You know, of course, that Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Lady Anne Darcy were sisters. )