Thick Description in Austenesque Fiction

Violating the rule about "Exposition"

Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript — foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.  Geertz, C., Thick Description[1] 

There is a divide buried in the hundreds of pleasurable books published every year in the world of fiction InspiredbyAusten.

On the one hand, some works depend upon a reader’s thorough understanding of Austen's worlds. These readers know the literary nuances by heart and accept the significance applied to those by Austen. The author’s task is to build a story using the same bricks as supplied by Austen. Mr. Bennet’s indolence does not need explanation: all accept that he is and use that exact word. Anne Elliot is a dutiful young woman deeply affected by her mother’s death and ready to take the advice of a substitute mother figure. Lizzy is impertinent, and the why is not essential to enjoy the book. The terrain upon which authors set these stories is familiar to readers. However, these JAFF (Jane Austen Fan Fiction) books are bright new stories using Austen’s characters in environs that require no explanation.

Across the fence, one finds variations that also accept the existence of Austen’s characters. What is malleable are their personalities. Authors in this realm focus on character development to create tales that utilize Austen as a starting point. Dutiful authors writing such variations often must account for missing bodies (killing off Kitty and Lydia as babes, making Mr. Collins invisible in the story, etc.) lest they are taken to task by fans.

Many of Austen’s scene settings may be retasked in Austenesque fiction. For instance, my recent book In Westminster’s Halls did not use the Meryton Assembly as the space for Darcy’s insult. Instead, a tired and recovering Darcy addresses his despicable words to Mr. Bennet, with Elizabeth standing by his side, on the walk before Covent Garden. Darcy’s pride and physical condition lead him to an erroneous conclusion based on his experience with men of the ton.  

If authors abandon Austen’s specific plot arc, they must engage in world-building.

That, dear reader, requires what can best be described by the anthropological term "Thick Description." Our responsibility as authors is to create believable environments through which our characters can move in pursuit of our plots. However, where Geertz was “reading” extant cultures, we are creating new ones within the general, very general, space defined in six novels and some fragments. We often abandon Austen’s specificity. That demands that we paint the canvas expanse behind our characters. We cannot depend on a reader’s understanding of Austen to fill in blanks that mean something entirely different within the schema of our truth.

Please consider Maria Grace’s Dragon Series as needing to do that…or my Bennet Wardrobe Series. Both demand trips into unfamiliar territory. Each universe operates on very specific rules, ones without which the entire edifice becomes incomprehensible and collapses.

The process of world-building insists that we answer very important questions, prime among them: ‘What must our readers know to understand the behavior of our characters?’ In other words, ‘If Kitty coughs, why is she so emotionally fragile?’ Authors are responsible to both characters and readers to explain why Kitty coughs or stops coughing. Otherwise, it is a plot device one step above a throw-away to allow Mrs. Bennet to snap, “Oh, Kitty, stop coughing. Your racket gets on my nerves!”

Austenesque authors use shaped behavior to help readers understand the cultural context and why characters act as they do. Geertz uses the word ethnography in a specific sense. To him, ethnographers immerse themselves in a culture and make thousands of observations. This enables them to understand what verbal and non-verbal communication means to those within, contrary to those who impose their interpretation on community members.

Thus, while exposition is often used pejoratively in modern fiction, such undertakings are necessary to allow readers to make sense of a book that challenges notional boundaries of what a Pride and Prejudice Variation should be. Like science fiction, Austenesque Variations should create a space within which a reader can take the author’s word for it or draw assumptions based upon the detail—thick description—laid before them.

Luhrmann asserted, ‘The ethnographer understands the [study] as an attempt to make the foreign world comprehensible to the reader.’ Authors must build worlds that make their novels authentic outgrowths of laws governing those domains. They stand as the interpreter of the context spread before the reader. All the while, authors must offer respect to some universal constants that Jane Austen established.[2]

Please enjoy this excerpt from my upcoming “Christmas” story, A Bennet Wardrobe Christmas Miracle.

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This excerpt is ©2024 by Donald P. Jacobson. Published in the United States of America. All rights reserved. None of his work is released to train any AI programs.

Prologue

Selkirk Castle, Matlock, December 10, 1827

Spice’s sharpness filled the air and rubbed its wispy shoulders against his nose. His home always smelled of something: Papa’s leather tack, his gun cleaner, Mama’s favorite perfume—roses over cut grass, —or the oil rubbed on acres of wood paneling. Selkirk Castle’s air was filled with aromas. This time of the year, though, looping evergreen garlands, plump baked goods, and steaming warm drinks colored the scent-scenery through which the youngster moved.

 ’Twas easy for a resourceful child, used to making his own fun, to picture himself a knight wending his way through a cathedral of towering trees, their bark-covered columns disappearing in the milky mists overhead. One of Derbyshire’s great houses, Selkirk’s cavernous depths were nearly impossible to warm during December’s dim days. Hearths filled with buckets of sea coals or split oak barely kept pace with what inevitably snuck past double windows, shutters, and thick drapes. The enforced closure against northern frost turned great hallways into subterranean passages and captured every smell, sweet or sour, to be spread along unstoppable drafts from cellar to cornice. His imagination was fired by Sir Walter’s Ivanhoe, first read to him by the author himself. Thus, adventure beckoned around every dark corner in a world easily built from blocks made of every sense he owned.

Deep runners cushioned the youngster as he crept along the dim corridor. Henry Fitzwilliam pretended to be a Spartan boy or an Anglo-Saxon squire sent to sneak into the enemy camp. Success would bring food, but failure’s humiliation would be driven home through an empty bowl and a severe beating.

A rambunctious boy’s fancy ran down such channels, especially that of a child who lived in a bonafide castle. Henry, forced into snowbound entertainment as the Five Families gathered in Matlock for the festive season, had been left to his own devices while the earl and countess did whatever adults did when their brothers and sisters descended upon their home.

Henry’s transit, though, was not solitary. His squad attacked their objective from multiple directions. Henry’s twin George and cousins Ellie Fitzwilliam and Carrie Bingley worked their way through Selkirk’s passages. Carrie—Caroline Jane—although a girl, was a dab hand at rangering as the earl called it. George’s interest in all things military had grown past toy soldier armies. Ellie was, well, Ellie.[3]

Wearying of governesses, the quartet had escaped Mama’s rule that seen and not heard was the appropriate way to behave. She could be touchy about what was right and proper. At seven—all born in 1820’s lambing season before the fever time—they were too young for the parlor and too old for the nursery’s playroom and preferred to adopt Sergeant Wilson’s dictum that unseen and unheard was the way His Majesty’s scouts put paid to crapaud pretensions. Henry took puerile pleasure in rolling that word over in his mind.

Grown-up activities held little interest for children born in the late spring of their parents' marriage. Older brothers and sisters found refuge away from the small fry, although only four were out of leading strings. Men and boys down from Cambridge or Eton—George William Darcy, Rory Benton, Tommy Bingley, and Eddie Gardiner—joined their fathers at the Fitzwilliam hunting lodge in a glen above the castle. Adolescent ladies—Henry’s sister Annie, Maddie Darcy, Bridgie Benton, Lou and Lizzy Bingley, and Emmy Gardiner—would be sitting near their respective mamas in the countess’s private parlor. Missing were Maria Rose Collins and Eddie Bennet. The distance from the ancestral home in Hertfordshire was too great for a wintertime trip to Derbyshire, or so deemed Aunt Charlotte.[4]

None of the girls were out. Louisa Jane was the oldest at fifteen. Henry’s Mama, as the highest-ranked lady of the four remaining Bennet sisters, had forbidden any females of the clan to make their curtseys before age eighteen. ‘Your grandmother, God rest her, insisted that country girls came out at fifteen. Look how that worked out for me!’

Henry knew his mother had had another husband before Papa—how or why remained closely held by his aunts and uncles, although Henry suspected it had something to do with being out. That man, Captain George Wickham, now lay in a hero’s grave in Pemberley’s cemetery. The family visited the gravesite every year on Waterloo’s anniversary. Mama became quiet as Papa laid a large wreath at the obelisk's base. She, though, always took a small bouquet of the cardinal roses—tangerine, blush, white, yellow, and crimson—and laid it next to a tiny heart and the script GHW engraved on the plinth invisible to all except those who knew where it was. Her sad contemplations were curious as Henry’s mother was typically energetic.[5]

Their goal was Aunt Mary’s suite. Her lair held secrets unimagined, mystic riddles that entranced the boy. Curiosity overwhelmed strictures about the sanctity of other people’s chambers. However, the red letter injunction against entry into Aunt Mary’s rooms was too much temptation for adventurous offspring. Of his aunts, Mrs. Benton was held in deference by all adults in the family. Even his mama, one of the Patronesses, went silent when Aunt Mary took the floor. From the corner of Henry’s mind rose a word—keeper—that floated about his aunt’s shoulders like a robe of state.

He pushed aside his musings. Unaware of what he had been doing, the Matlock heir, fully half Bennet, owned the family talent to split his mind and focus on questions unlinked to the task before him. Setting aside those considerations was the matter of a moment.

The great gateway to the Regent Queen’s apartment lay ahead.

***

Gathering around the apartment’s door, the youngsters looked at each other. Henry, the acknowledged leader, nodded and gripped the brass handle. As with everything at Selkirk, this bolt was just so, kept that way by a fleet of maids. The latch slid silently from its seat, and the door whispered back. Four figures slipped into the darkened sitting room, the only light cast by the sputtering remnants of the blaze. The youngsters needed to be careful lest they were discovered by a servant entering to top up the firebox.

There, in its special niche, hulked their objective—Aunt Mary’s Wardrobe. Why the Bentons always traveled with the massive cabinet tickled young minds. Adult eccentricities were the stuff of imagination. Henry had settled on his aunt’s attachment to Grandfather Bennet, a legend—the Founder—who left this world twelve years ago, as the motive. Otherwise, why would anyone have a special crate built to protect and transport something that graced every dressing room?

And all Five Family homes—Pemberley, Thornhill, Longbourn, Darcy, Matlock Houses, and even Aunt Georgie’s Beach House—had an alcove that fit Aunt Mary’s Wardrobe like a glove. That intentional feature said much about the cabinet and Aunt Mary.

The viscount was too young to understand precisely what Rory and Bridget’s mama and papa did when away from Kympton. He had heard some of Papa’s friends—usually the Duke and Marquess, much older than Papa—grumble about Aunt Mary’s “damnable campaigns.” Henry was unsure what his aunt did to earn their anger; they were always nice to him and George. The Marquess found Mama’s company particularly pleasing, and the family had visited several Paget homes in the past few years.

Henry’s mama, though, threw the wardrobe into a sinister and intriguing light. She would grip a youthful arm with her warm hand and intone, ‘Beware of the Wardrobe. Do not touch it, for it has a nasty sense of humor.’ The Countess’s favorite epigram did nothing but fire her son’s imagination, making the Wardrobe a temptation that rivaled Pandora’s Box.

A siren’s song drew the children to the huge cupboard. Inlaid wood strips created an intricate pattern—the countess called it marquetry—that shimmered in the dying fire’s orange glow. Two high-cuffed gauntlets were draped over the pulls, calling out to be worn to shelter the wardrobe from careless handling—or were they to protect the wearer? The gloves were not fingerless but thick like the mitts Cook used when pulling trays of biscuits from the oven.

George bravely reached out. The pattern shivered as his hand came near. The girls gasped and clutched each other’s hands, Ellie leaning into Henry for security. For his part, Henry reached out for his brother’s shoulder in caution. The younger Fitzwilliam dodged out of reach.

“Easy, George,” Henry whispered, “If anything happens to Aunt Mary’s wardrobe, we will never see Christmas! Papa will send us off to be cabin boys in Uncle Will’s West Africa Squadron.”

George gamely replied, nervous at violating his mother’s orders but refusing to admit that anything could go awry, “I only want to peek inside to see what Aunt Mary hides in there, probably nothing more than her bonnets, gloves, and slippers. But I will be careful since I look forward to seeing your face when Black Pete leaves you a pile of coal.”

The boy’s chin firmed, and he grabbed the gloves, tossing them aside before he leaned toward the cabinet. George planted both hands on the door handles and made to pull.

A thousand bees buzzed, and the pressure built…

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[1] Geertz, C., Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, http://www.sociosite.net/topics/texts/Geertz_Thick_Description.php

[2] Luhrmann, Tanya M., Thick Description: Methodology, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, (2^nd Ed., V. 24) p293. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.44067-2

[3] Anne Eleanor Fitzwilliam (1820-1877) was the daughter of Earl Richard Fitzwilliam’s older brother, Viscount Reginald Fitzwilliam (1780-1820) and his wife Eleanor (1797-1820). Lady Anne married Viscount Henry Bennet Fitzwilliam (1820-1871) in 1842 and bore a son, Reginald, in 1843. She succeeded Countess Lydia Fitzwilliam as the ninth countess upon Old General’s death in 1857. For more see Epilogue One in The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion. George Thomas Fitzwilliam (1820-1863), the Young General, never recovered from the shame of the disaster in Crimea. His descendants stepped back from participation in Five Family activities although some did serve on the Board of Life Directors of the Bennet Family Trust.

[4] Anne Elizabeth Mary Fitzwilliam (1814-1867) was the daughter of Brigadier Richard Fitzwilliam (1781-1857) and Anne de Bourgh Fitzwilliam (1784-1814). Heiress of Rosings, upon her mother’s death, “Annie,” later wed Sir Edward Gardiner Jr. Bart. Their son married Francine Bennet, the daughter of Edward Bennet (adopted), and Maria Rose Collins Bennet, bringing Bennet Eyes into the Gardiner line.

[5] Georges Henri Wickham (1940-1943) was Lydia and George Wickham’s only child. Please see The Pilgrim.