(no subject)
Aug. 14th, 2020 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThe Independence of Miss Mary Bennet by Colleen McCullough
I got fascinated by the problem of Mary Bennet in my most recent Pride and Prejudice re-read and decided to grab one of the pro fanfics grappling with the problem of Mary. The problem of Mary is that for little apparent reason, she is the least apparently sympathetic of the sisters, with even less reason behind her action than Lydia and Kitty. Pride and Prejudice does not take Lydia or Kitty seriously, but it at least sympathizes with their teenage desire for amusement and affection. But Mary reads solemnly out of horrendous moralizing tomes with little evaluative thought of her own and no self-awareness. There has to be more to her, she has to have some inner life, some interest or ambition. A number of writers have tried to resolve the problem by telling her story. The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet is by the author of The Thornbirds, which I haven't read but might check out now out of curiosity.
A quick skim showed that the book was unpopular among hardcore Janeites when it came out... with good reason. If you find an emotional continuity in Pride and Prejudice's primary romance, McCullough does not. Her book begins with extremely hostile polemic against a Darcy who is characterized in an aggressively unpleasant way. All of his feints toward humility in Austen were false attempts to woo Elizabeth, all of his acts of generosity and repentance in Austen were symptomatic of his abusively controlling nature. He has spent the nineteen years between the end of Pride and Prejudice and this book relentlessly pursuing political power, seeking to become Tory Prime Minister. He has done so at the expense of Elizabeth and her family, exiling Mrs. Bennet and Mary as her minder to an estate under his control, using his influence to send Wickham to America and keep Lydia away from gossip, harassing his somewhat effeminate son. None of this really makes sense as a continuation of the narrative, we have to accept it as revisionist/AU.
I was willing to take her at her game. I love Pride and Prejudice and I do think the Darcy at the end of the book is a different, more self-critical and open man than the one at the start, but if McCullough wants to write the version of the story where he was faking it, let's see where it goes. It starts off as you'd sort of expect it to start off, setting the stage, showing where all the characters from the book have gone, having a few dinner parties, gossiping about various courtships, but then...
IT GOES PLACES.
Darcy, it turns out, is the son of a lecherous pimp with a vast hidden fortune that was stolen by a delusional cult leader who has been kidnapping orphans and raising them underground. Darcy's illegitimate half-brother Ned, never acknowledged by his father, is a sociopathic murderer who goes around 'fixing' problems for Darcy while giving him at least plausible deniability. Mary Bennet, en route to Manchester to investigate Dickensian social ills and write a moralizing book about them, is kidnapped by a highwayman named... wait for it... CAPTAIN THUNDER. Who is later murdered, alongside his common law wife, by sociopathic bastard Ned. Who then dies in a gunpowder explosion during a showdown with the cult leader in a subterranean cave. Mary is then rekidnapped by the delusional cult leader and caged and forced to take dictation of absurd religious scriptures. (Lydia also gets murdered, probably at Ned's behest, poisoned while trying to make it look like she just drunk herself to death, but that's like a C plot.)
There seems to be this continuous drive in the book to deglamorize Austen. Regency England needs to be represented as being dirtier, more dangerous, more unfair to women than Austen shows it. Again, I was willing to follow McCullough down that path, even though I think she sells Austen short. (I think a major point of Pride and Prejudice is that Regency women live extremely fraught lives, but saying that they have no choice and no agency misses the myriad ways in which women wield informal power and influence, and make decisions that affect their own lives.). But the third time Mary Bennet takes a blow to the head to prove this point proved too many for me. And ANYWAY, the end of McCullough's book involves the Bennet sisters, less the murdered Lydia, newly reunited and on the same page and pooling their resources to build orphanages and take control of their lives in a way that I think probably is historically viable but is not consistent with the universe of possibilities imagined by Austen, which seems to work against the ideas developed in earlier parts of the book about the limitations of being a female Bennet.
But if you want to read the story in which the Bennets go up against Captain Thunder, this is your book. It's hard to get a handle on the way this book does genre, it is for all intents and purposes a 21st century literary novel, with no effort to go Gothic stylistically and no attempt to pastiche Austen's own language, but its plot sure does lean toward pulpy adventure novel a lot more than I expected it to.
I got fascinated by the problem of Mary Bennet in my most recent Pride and Prejudice re-read and decided to grab one of the pro fanfics grappling with the problem of Mary. The problem of Mary is that for little apparent reason, she is the least apparently sympathetic of the sisters, with even less reason behind her action than Lydia and Kitty. Pride and Prejudice does not take Lydia or Kitty seriously, but it at least sympathizes with their teenage desire for amusement and affection. But Mary reads solemnly out of horrendous moralizing tomes with little evaluative thought of her own and no self-awareness. There has to be more to her, she has to have some inner life, some interest or ambition. A number of writers have tried to resolve the problem by telling her story. The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet is by the author of The Thornbirds, which I haven't read but might check out now out of curiosity.
A quick skim showed that the book was unpopular among hardcore Janeites when it came out... with good reason. If you find an emotional continuity in Pride and Prejudice's primary romance, McCullough does not. Her book begins with extremely hostile polemic against a Darcy who is characterized in an aggressively unpleasant way. All of his feints toward humility in Austen were false attempts to woo Elizabeth, all of his acts of generosity and repentance in Austen were symptomatic of his abusively controlling nature. He has spent the nineteen years between the end of Pride and Prejudice and this book relentlessly pursuing political power, seeking to become Tory Prime Minister. He has done so at the expense of Elizabeth and her family, exiling Mrs. Bennet and Mary as her minder to an estate under his control, using his influence to send Wickham to America and keep Lydia away from gossip, harassing his somewhat effeminate son. None of this really makes sense as a continuation of the narrative, we have to accept it as revisionist/AU.
I was willing to take her at her game. I love Pride and Prejudice and I do think the Darcy at the end of the book is a different, more self-critical and open man than the one at the start, but if McCullough wants to write the version of the story where he was faking it, let's see where it goes. It starts off as you'd sort of expect it to start off, setting the stage, showing where all the characters from the book have gone, having a few dinner parties, gossiping about various courtships, but then...
IT GOES PLACES.
Darcy, it turns out, is the son of a lecherous pimp with a vast hidden fortune that was stolen by a delusional cult leader who has been kidnapping orphans and raising them underground. Darcy's illegitimate half-brother Ned, never acknowledged by his father, is a sociopathic murderer who goes around 'fixing' problems for Darcy while giving him at least plausible deniability. Mary Bennet, en route to Manchester to investigate Dickensian social ills and write a moralizing book about them, is kidnapped by a highwayman named... wait for it... CAPTAIN THUNDER. Who is later murdered, alongside his common law wife, by sociopathic bastard Ned. Who then dies in a gunpowder explosion during a showdown with the cult leader in a subterranean cave. Mary is then rekidnapped by the delusional cult leader and caged and forced to take dictation of absurd religious scriptures. (Lydia also gets murdered, probably at Ned's behest, poisoned while trying to make it look like she just drunk herself to death, but that's like a C plot.)
There seems to be this continuous drive in the book to deglamorize Austen. Regency England needs to be represented as being dirtier, more dangerous, more unfair to women than Austen shows it. Again, I was willing to follow McCullough down that path, even though I think she sells Austen short. (I think a major point of Pride and Prejudice is that Regency women live extremely fraught lives, but saying that they have no choice and no agency misses the myriad ways in which women wield informal power and influence, and make decisions that affect their own lives.). But the third time Mary Bennet takes a blow to the head to prove this point proved too many for me. And ANYWAY, the end of McCullough's book involves the Bennet sisters, less the murdered Lydia, newly reunited and on the same page and pooling their resources to build orphanages and take control of their lives in a way that I think probably is historically viable but is not consistent with the universe of possibilities imagined by Austen, which seems to work against the ideas developed in earlier parts of the book about the limitations of being a female Bennet.
But if you want to read the story in which the Bennets go up against Captain Thunder, this is your book. It's hard to get a handle on the way this book does genre, it is for all intents and purposes a 21st century literary novel, with no effort to go Gothic stylistically and no attempt to pastiche Austen's own language, but its plot sure does lean toward pulpy adventure novel a lot more than I expected it to.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-14 05:23 pm (UTC)Do you have any recs re: Mary focused profic?
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-14 05:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-17 11:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-14 05:27 pm (UTC)Thornbirds paperbacks were everywhere when I was a kid, but I remember only the mini-series, which I was pretty into at age 13. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-14 06:17 pm (UTC)I mean, it sounds on-brand for McCullough. I was passionately in love with the Thornbirds when I was younger; the TV movie with Richard Chamberlain as the fallen priest was on at a crucially influential time for me. But I definitely got over it. It's incredibly pulpy and OTT, but has so much great detail, and introduced me to so many great Aussie actors I still love to this day.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-14 09:38 pm (UTC)I got briefly interested upon reading this sentence, as I find the central romance of P&P to be perplexing, but upon reading further I think that McCullough and I are suspicious of it in quite different ways. Alas.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-14 09:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-15 02:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-15 02:39 am (UTC)Not that Jane Austin is Mayberry, but, this isn't the Chabon version of a Reese's peanut butter cup. Or even the Turtledove.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-23 02:54 am (UTC)This post was a ride