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Austenesque authors have, in recent years, begun to explore taking the classic characters and extracting them from their Regency worlds to insert them into (usually) modern environments. T’is neither my place nor my inclination to assess whether these variations from tradition are appropriate or not. Of course, I sent the Bennet Wardrobe protagonists and antagonists all over the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, so that horse may already have left the barn.
In this forum, I will address the core difficulty facing any writer seeking to position Darcy, Elizabeth, Jane, Bingley, Fitzwilliam, Georgiana, and Wickham in any time frame other than the Regency. The moment authors step beyond the Regency, they must face an additional double task…
1) Creating an accurate and logical historical world to provide an environment within which the characters must live to express their truth.
2) The characters themselves, in the process of expressing their truths, must interact convincingly with their surroundings.
While we are intimately familiar with all of Miss Austen’s leading characters, we ultimately only understand them within the semiotic framework created by the Mistress: the discursive debate between power and powerlessness, wealth and poverty, city and country, gentry and trade. The relations of men and women were governed by the individual’s position within the larger social scheme. Propriety and sexual probity were limited by the questions of disease and inheritance. Greater sexual freedom was accorded to men of the upper classes as well as men and women of the lower classes who had no property to pass along to succeeding generations.
A deep understanding of these memes is unnecessary to appreciate the set pieces through which Canonical characters move. What was is in Austenland because it could be no other way. The Regency shapes these characters as surely as the Marines mold their recruits. Austen, since she was writing for a Regency audience of the upper classes, did not need to explain the world within which her personages existed.
Darcy is a man proud of his heritage and position. He has found security in his armor of propriety. He never questions that he is powerful. It is simply his due because of his birth. Others are lesser than him, not because of defects, but rather that is simply the nature of early Nineteenth Century Britain. (A side note: the ton frequently comforted its exploitation of the lower classes by embracing Social Darwinism—to steal a late Nineteenth Century philosophy propounded by the wealthy.)
If anything, Darcy is a caricature, the exception painted to act as a mirror within which the true nature of the ton was reflected. The decadence of the Ten Thousand—and implicitly the Prince Regent—plasters giant colorful gouts on the canvas when it encounters the moral certainty of Darcy.
Elizabeth is the antithesis of everything a Regency woman was expected to be. She is neither meek nor submissive. Her accomplishments are few while her post-Germaine Greer achievements—well-read, curious about the natural world as well as politics, opinionated, athletic, and so on—offer her up as a “new” woman much more so than Charles Bingley was a “new” man, determined as he was to go backward in time from the Industrial Revolution.
Obviously, we could go on forever exploring the nature of ODC and others as they stood in the Regency.
However, taking the characters and translating them directly to the modern era has its dangers.
With the elimination of coverture in the late Nineteenth Century and the adjustment of divorce laws, dropping Darcy and Elizabeth into Twentieth Century Times Square can be a hazardous undertaking. Other advancements—the advent of women’s voting rights, the removal of racial and gender barriers in education and employment, and the removal of paternity questions in the face of modern science—mean that modern renditions have to carefully translate the characters, making them modern while leaving them recognizable.
Edward Steichen, The Flatiron (1904)
Would a Darcy born into Post-World War II privilege be the same sort of man as one born shortly after the American Revolution? Would he have enlisted to serve in Vietnam or sought ways to evade the war? Would he act with a social conscience or would he have held in disdain those who did not win the birth-parent lottery as being deficient in character and capability?
While a Napoleonic-era Elizabeth Bennet seems refreshingly radical to a Twenty-first Century reader used to limpid Regency Romance heroines, would that same woman embrace the Equal Rights Amendment movement in the 1970s? Would she have sought a career, or would she have been satisfied to remain at home to raise her family, to battle loads of laundry, school projects, and broken adolescent hearts? Would she have found Darcy’s efforts to redeem himself compelling enough to earn a second chance at her heart or would she have cut him loose in favor of Fitzwilliam, now no longer bound to marry for wealth?
Thus, authors seeking to insert the eternal relationship story into modern times must evolve these characters to make them consonant and, thus, recognizable to readers. They must be able to clearly inhabit the world into which they were born, or they will never be convincing. Two wonderful Austenesque Authors have successfully done just this: Beau North in her remarkable Longbourn’s Songbird and the late Barbara Silkstone in her lighthearted mysteries involving canine psychologist Lizzie Bennet and a modern property magnate/knight Fitzwilliam Darcy.
That requires certain amounts of relevant information about the times into which the characters have been placed. The social, economic, political/geopolitical, and geographic factors that create the ground of history upon which the characters must stand need to be offered up for readers not thoroughly aware of the time window. Only then may the characters be allowed to step onto the stage.
One other item: authors must offer believable language that positions the story appropriately. Words anachronistic in the Regency suddenly become “okay” (pick any time in the United States after the Election of 1836) if geographically sound. Characters can tell lazy footmen to “move their asses” (The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion) if they have spent time in the future. Others can understand “closure” (The Exile: The Countess Visits Longbourn) if they have become acquainted with Carl Jung.
However, that context must be clearly established. An example of this would be the window within which the readers view the last stanza of Volume Five of the Bennet Wardrobe: The Exile: The Countess Visits Longbourn. This final book within the volume is set at the Beach House in Deauville in 1944 in the weeks immediately following D-Day. To set the stage for the final crisis, some history must be laid down. Please consider the excerpt below from The Exile: The Countess Visits Longbourn.
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Books mentioned in this column:
The Bennet Wardrobe Series
Lizzy Bennet Meets the Countess (approx 50,000 words) is Volue Four of the Wardrobe.
Link to
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B094MQFK5C?ref_=dbs_p_pwh_rwt_anx_b_lnk&storeType=ebooks
Longbourn’s Songbird by Beau North
Mr. Darcy’s Dogs by Barbara Silkstone
Latest Release by Don Jacobson. Available in Kindle ebook, KindleUnlimited, paper, and Audible
The Sailor’s Rest
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This excerpt from “The Exile: The Countess Visits Longbourn” is ©2018 by Donald P. Jacobson. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any form, either print or electronic, without the expressed written consent of the creator is prohibited. Published in the United States of America.
Chapter 35
The Beach House at Deauville, August 19, 1944
….
In the twelve years since that remarkable month spent at Madras House, Lady Matlock had lived her dowager’s life in Deauville, London, Paris, New York, and Selkirk. That meant she had stood as nana to her grandchildren as they tumbled through the yards fronting the great estates and later strode across the stages at Oxbridge and the Sorbonne—even the young ladies. She had readily sponsored Liam Wilson’s boys: one to earn his doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago under Professor Fermi and the other matriculating at the University of Edinburgh before moving on to medical training at The London. She imagined both were employed in the war effort. However, isolated as she was in Occupied France, she had no idea what either was doing to bring the conflict to its conclusion.[i]
What little communication she had had with her relations passed through various neutral countries. Mail would arrive, hand delivered by Portuguese, Swiss, Spaniards, or Swedes. The reach of the Five Families was blocked by Hitler’s armies, but the Trust’s factors in Lisbon, Berne, Madrid, and Stockholm controlled items desperately needed by Berlin’s thugs: tungsten, iron ore, hard currency, and access to South America. While neutrality had its uses, these more pragmatic reasons conferred an aura of invulnerability upon those serving the Families and granted protection in the invisible but deadly game being played between the British SOE, the German Abwehr, and the American OSS.[ii]
She had long recognized that her own immediate security in Occupied France depended upon the strength of her friends in the power centers behind Hitler’s regime. The relationships forged in the heady days before World War I—and later in the twenties—transcended politics and national borders. Lady Matlock was unabashed in leaning on Krupps and Thyssens to keep from being deported from her home to a detention camp. Her continued independence to this point of the war had depended on the fact that the little man and his coterie of sycophants were still in awe of the Kaiserreich’s elites—the old Prussian military officer corps of vons and unds as well as the industrialists—who had helped the Nazis in the 1930s when they seemed to be the only answer to the aristocracy’s fear of a Communist revolution.
Sadly, they had believed they could control Hitler’s excesses, the verbalization of which had endeared him to German masses frightened by the Depression and feeling displaced by change in a modern world. Once he had eliminated all his competitors— several of whom the elites had depended upon to keep him in check—’twas too late. However, ten years later, she knew that the level of disdain in which the remaining betters still held the grasping criminality of the regime was only increasing as the cities were reduced to rubble and the Allies tore gaping chunks out of the flanks of Festung Europa.[iii]
Thus, Kitty put up with the inconvenience of infrequent letters passed through multiple mail drops between London and Deauville. Any deeper attempt to communicate with Fitzwilliams, Gardiners, Bingleys, Darcys, or Bennets could expose the House to the Gestapo’s undesirable curiosity. The Germans had become especially sensitive after the June 6 landings.
And even more so after the bungled attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20; which marked the first day of the Nazis’ war upon Old Germany.
As Hitler recovered from his injuries, Himmler unleashed the SS upon any threats to the regime—real or perceived. The black-shirted, jackbooted wearers of the death’s head had expanded their murderous excesses over the past four weeks from the wealthy suburbs of Berlin and Munich into the occupied territories. Most of those arrested had not been involved in the actual plot, but with the Allied forces streaking out of their Normandy beachhead, the SS and the Gestapo were in a fever trying to settle old scores as quickly as they could before their targets slipped through their fingers behind the olive-drab protection of dozens of enemy divisions.
Her lifeline—and perhaps more—was now in danger. Roving SS execution squads had harassed even Herr von Steiger as he traveled from his Alpine fastness across France to the Channel town. Only his Swiss passport and his strategic use of Reichsführer Himmler’s guarantee of safe conduct saved him from internment in a concentration camp or worse. What he had carried in his briefcase was valuable beyond comprehension.
Kitty had been undisturbed to this point, as she had been since the spring of 1940. She had continued in Deauville; cut off from the rest of the Families. Well, not totally isolated.
Maggie and Jacques’s son, who was Eloise’s husband, periodically checked in on Kitty and his aged father to make sure that the two old friends were safe. Maxie took every precaution because nobody wished to tempt the weaker of the neighborhood’s residents to try to collect the hundred-thousand-franc bounty placed on Commandant Maxim’s head by the frustrated Gestapo. To his credit, Maxie had tried everything short of kidnapping his beloved Aunt Kate—and mother-by-proxy—to encourage her to leave Deauville before the French government capitulated in June 1940.
Her demurral had been both realistic and personal. “Maxie, you are my most-loved friend’s son. Would you have me abandon your father? You know he will never leave Maggie. Jacques’s greatest wish is to rest next to her in the dunes by the beach. Besides, if I leave, who will act as your alternate method of communication with SOE?”
And, thus, Kitty stayed. As Deauville was of no strategic importance, the town was spared the worst efforts of both the Axis and the Allies. The urgency to move the Wardrobe, for years perforce an impossible fantasy, had declined since June, especially as the Allied forces had finally achieved the long-awaited breakout through the hedgerows surrounding their beachhead along the Channel. The rumormongers had held that it was just a matter of days before the last of les Bosches[EP7] [DJ8] would pack up and scurry back toward the Rhine.
Kitty believed this to be a pipedream as Hans Richter, the Kommandant’s adjutant and her official minder, had kept her abreast of the latest military scuttlebutt. He advised that the Allies were much more intent on pushing toward Paris to liberate the greatest symbol of the French Republic. She trusted his word because of another reason: the woman with whom he had fallen in love.
Lydia Georgiana Wickham.
[i] The elder was stationed in Alamogordo, New Mexico working on the Manhattan Project under Professor Oppenheimer. His younger brother was an infectious diseases specialist attached to SACSEAC…Supreme Allied Commander, Southeast Asia Command (Lord Louis Mountbatten).
[ii] Special Operations Executive. British secret organization that coordinated with Resistance Groups in WWII. The German organization is untranslatable. The American Office of Strategic Services was coordinated by General William Donovan. The OSS later evolved into the modern Central Intelligence Agency.
[iii] See The Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934.