Austen and Active Reading
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The Meryton Press edition of Volume Six of the Bennet Wardrobe Series was released in November 2021. Please enjoy my thinking of how I work to involve my readers’ understanding.
An editorial note: Rather than provide you with a single lengthy excerpt, I have inserted several shorter ones throughout the article to illustrate my thesis.
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Those of us who love all things Austenesque oftentimes go deep into the weeds as we try to divine the “true” meaning and intent of scenic elements that establish the framework upon which both character development and plot rest. Austen forces her readers to be active participants in the development of the story. She liberally sprinkles breadcrumbs, but then allows us to be clever—or not—in assigning meaning to them to create an overarching interpretation.
A perfect example of this process sees Miss Bingley dragging Miss Elizabeth around the Netherfield parlor. Miss Austen, of course, tells us the reason by using Darcy as her avatar for the moment.
“You can only have two motives, Caroline, and I would interfere with either…
“Either you are in each other's confidence and have secret affairs to discuss, or you are conscious that your figures appear to the greatest advantage by walking. If the first, I should get in your way. If the second, I can admire you much better from here.”
(Pride and Prejudice, Ch. 11).
Already aware of that which Austen told us, we ground our understanding of this scene in the fact that Miss Bingley holds Elizabeth in disdain and would have no secrets to share with the Bennet woman. Miss Austen, therefore, lays a forced choice in front of us. Our only conclusion can be that the walk, suggested by Miss Bingley, was meant to entice Darcy with…no wait, not their, but rather, Caroline’s…beauty.
And, while Austen leaves us with the impression that Caroline is attractive, the Bingley sister was certainly tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt Darcy. After all, she had been in his company for multiple Seasons. Neither her figure nor her money had attracted his attention. Her effort here, therefore, underlines Austen’s positioning of her as being a somewhat pathetic, clueless figure, not understanding that she was offering Darcy an implicit comparison between her physical charms and Elizabeth’s.
But, at no point does Austen insert herself in the narrative to tell readers about the nature of Caroline Bingley. We can assemble the clues ourselves.
In The Avenger: Thomas Bennet and a Father’s Lament, I use a variety of expository devices to portray useful information, set character traits in place and establish underlying elements that make subsequent action or narrative plausible. I have studiously tried to emulate, if not her language stylings, much of her structural technique. The Lady truly had an interesting literary toolbox!
The structure of the novel is in six movements as if it were a romantic symphony. The earliest portion—Chapters 1-7—are found in Book One: Prelude. There the character of the World War II version of Richard Fitzwilliam, an essential supporting personage, is established.
Consider the narrative exposition made in Chapter 3…when the Right Rev. Richard Fitzwilliam (Lt. Colonel, Ret., Special Operations Executive, Ret.) is contemplating a note left on the doorstep of his temporary rectory at Stromness, about one month after the end of World War II. There he had sought peace from his PTSD after years serving behind enemy lines.
Yet, his calling to serve the Lord was of such strength that he could not become a hermit. However, he recognized that he could never voluntarily avail himself of his connections to immerse himself in one of the preferred parishes where aristocratic rectors most often were installed. He had no patience for diocesan politics. The Rt. Rev. Richard Fitzwilliam could only stomach so many teas at fusty bishopric palaces where smarmy clerics sought to curry favor and gain patronage. St. Mary’s, here in the blustery Orkneys, was the best living for him…and was the only such refuge open. The rectory in Bude, Cornwall had been long unavailable, filled as it was by a twenty-five-year man: himself a refugee from the 1914 cataclysm.
Richard’s family, though, would not let him crawl into a hole in the heather and pull the shrubs in after him.
Lady Anne, in her latest letter, offered that she had accepted Richard’s excuse that his parish duties had made it impossible to attend the traditional Five Family grandes vacances at the reopened Deauville Beach House. Then she slyly had set her piton in the logical crack his summertime demurral had provided.
“Perhaps my son,” she gently wheedled, …
Richard smiled as he imagined the irresistible gaze of those caramel eyes, wide in feigned innocence, rising from her supremely laid, cream-colored notepaper, focused on him.
“…who is a minister of the Lord, would find it in himself to attend the October dedication of his grandmother’s marker in the tiny burial ground behind the Dune and deliver a eulogy to the great lady.”
I have always imagined this Twentieth Century iteration of a Fitzwilliam male to be a combination of Darcy and his cousin, a man with a fully formed sense of duty to God, Country, and Family. These paragraphs allow readers to understand “The Preacher”—by appealing to their own underlying knowledge of how war impacts people—without my commentary telling them how he was shaped. Likewise, he is a man who knows that women are not bits of fluff to be ignored. This foreshadows what comes next. He would shortly encounter a strong and resourceful woman whom he had loved but had believed dead.
This, though, was to be a game of chess between masters of the darker arts. And, so he went to meet her.
However, that place [where they were to meet] had one fatal flaw that Richard could turn to his advantage; all thanks to a drink-befuddled farmer who last September stumbled in the steeply angled meadow that bordered upon the slope leading to the lip!
’Twas one of those rare fall days when the prevailing gusts blew offshore rather than on. When old MacGregor tangled his brogans and ended up face down in the browned sward, his freshly charged pipe, knocked from between the few teeth he had left in his ancient head, set ablaze the golden dry fodder waiting to be cut and baled. With the easterlies raging, the entire hillside had been turned to ash in moments.
The winter’s melt and the spring rains loosened the denuded soil on this least-loved silage patch. The pebbly glacial leavings now covering the eroded brae was as stable as a child’s bag of aggies, always shifting in a perpetual motion determined to fly across the trail and down to the Cambrian scree piled on the shore. Any person seeking to plant a foot on this surface, loosely bound with the thinnest of clayey mud, would end up tumbling out of control.
Fitzwilliam realized that he must meet the sender of the note…and that it was likely that the writer, long missing in the hands of the SS, would pose a mortal danger. As he approached the rendezvous, his mind turned to the context of the meeting, as neither party had communicated to one another prior to that moment: in fact for more than a year since her (yes, a woman!) betrayal to the Gestapo. From Chapter 4…
Fitzwilliam narrowed his eyes but did not break his rolling gait lest he alert Rose. This place would have been where he would have prepared his own ambush if he had been so inclined. Here, in the thirty-odd feet after the path had cut through a small rise to then swing around a large piece of Norway, a most noticeable glacial detritus poking up from the brackish heath, rested all elements necessary to provide ideal conditions for assassination rather than conversation. Thus, the final piece in his understanding of her urgency to speak with him slid into place.
“She has no interest in exploring my thoughts on the status of rationing, to be sure. ’Tis to be wet work. If I recall correctly, Rose found a hatpin to serve up a near bloodless murder.”
The Preacher never broke stride, knowing that if he gave the slightest whiff of awareness, his quarry would vanish, only to try again in a time-and-place of her, not his, choosing.
Again, readers can further understand the character of Fitzwilliam. Although a man of God, he is also been shaped into a trained killer.
We finally move from narrative to action as the attack, long telegraphed, is undertaken. The woman’s body is under the control of her alter-ego Rose, however, the dominant personality, Eileen, is conscious and able to exert a minute influence over the action.
Fearful that what she would do would prove insufficient, but even more fearful of inaction, Eileen dipped her hands into the translucent, rippling streams flowing in front of her. Her intervention slowed their passage from the sky-blue irises exposed to the wind and dust howling on the hillside. Akin to a photo flipbook interrupted in its smooth page-after-page snapping, that wonderfully agile brain, that in earlier times had been her home, paused in its processing, freezing on the last complete image. The lag was momentary, but enough.
In that unseen fraction of a sliver of a moment, Fitzwilliam continued to move across the field of play; not far, but enough.
This fluctuation, this stutter of sight, led Rose to miss the center of her target. Where the steel-tipped javelin of her body should have driven itself home directly between Fitzwilliam’s shoulder blades, Eileen’s fiddling with her optic signals changed reality. The delay was not much more than a half a heartbeat, but it caused her to leap at what she thought was the bullseye when it was really the next outer ring.
Rather than burying itself at the base of Fitzwilliam’s skull, her hatpin scoured a furrow in his right trapezius before snagging in the collar of his bridge coat.
As for her target, Richard’s sixth sense alerted him that the moment of greatest danger had been upon him. Perhaps ’twas a change in air pressure or the pattern of the wind disturbed as her body sliced through the air toward him. Whatever warned the Preacher, he had the slightest opportunity to flinch, to hunch his shoulders. Even so, his muscles, quick as his war-honed senses were, had only begun their upward movement when a ripping pain on the right side of his neck snapped his senses. Then muscle memory took over.
As Rose’s weight slammed into his back. Fitzwilliam quickly used his six-foot frame to transfer her forward momentum into an over-the-shoulder throw which flipped the slight woman above and around his rotating body. She landed flat on her back: her head closest to his feet. The impact stunned her but did not render her unconscious.
The SOE man above the supine figure knew that she would take advantage of the slightest opening. Chivalry and human feelings vanished in the glare of Mars ascendant.
He finished his move with a fierce right-hand jab to her jaw that snapped her head to the side and put both Rose and Eileen to sleep.
By now we have more than enough evidence to understand that, like his namesake, this Colonel Fitzwilliam was a man of uncommon bravery and skill as well as faith and, perhaps, compassion. He also dealt with a woman in a Twentieth-Century manner…rather than the patriarchal style of the Regency. This nascent egalitarianism between the sexes is a theme that runs through much of the Bennet Wardrobe.
I hope that readers of The Avenger: Thomas Bennet and a Father’s Lament will enjoy the elements which demand that they be active readers, engaging with the history created within the Bennet Wardrobe Universe. I look forward to your comments and, later, your reviews.
Speaking of reviews: here is a Five-Star review of an earlier edition.
“The whole series is amazing, but this book is quite moving. I laughed, I cried, I felt quite frustrated at times and at others felt quite giddy with characters and storyline. This series is quite imaginative, and I am deeply regretful that it was in my TBR pile for so long. This is series would make great television miniseries because the author's world-building and storytelling very compelling.”
I certainly hope you will enjoy the new edition of The Avenger: Thomas Bennet and a Father’s Lament. For all of my reader friends, I have to remind you that the various volumes in the series are not standalone. The world-building begins in Volume One, The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey. While it seems that characters skip willy-nilly about the timeline, there is literary logic for the sequencing of the tales. Volume Seven, The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion will be re-released by Meryton Press at the end of December 2021. The final book of the series—Volume Eight—brings the last segments of the tapestry together. The Grail: The Saving of Elizabeth Darcy will be published in the First Quarter of 2022.
Global Links to the Meryton editions of the Bennet Wardrobe series.
The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey
The Exile: Kitty Bennet and the Belle Époque
Lizzy Bennet Meets the Countess
The Exile: The Countess Visits Longbourn
The Avenger: Thomas Bennet and a Father’s Lament
I look forward to your comments.
By the way, do not forget that the Meryton Press Advent Calendar is still available (through 12/25/21) for you to enjoy. Please go to https://merytonpress.com/santa-press-advent-calendar/