Anghraine

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.]

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

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