1 - 20 of 261 Bookmarks
Navigation
List of Bookmarks
-
Saving One's Estate by BingBennet
Fandoms: Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice & Related Fandoms
01 Apr 2021
Tags
Summary
Story summary: Rosings Park was left to Anne de Bourgh when Sir Lewis de Bourgh passed. With Anne is facing her own death, she arranges a nefarious scheme to allow her mother to stay at Rosings while giving Elizabeth independence.
EB&FD will end up with a HEA, but this is not a story for everyone. Most of the major themes in this story come from history, people I've known, or things the author has experienced.
This story was originally published in 2016 as "Lady Catherine Heading for the Hedgerows". It was taken down at the start of 2019. It was restarted in April of 2020. See Ch 1 for a more detailed description of what happened. I am now back to reposting the stories for your enjoyment. I will be posting at least 1 chapter a week.
This story is 39 chapters with the last 3 being an epilogue and bonus content.
Enjoy.
-
Bookmark Notes:
A disappointing read.
The beginning sounds promising - author talks of how important moon phases/natural lightning are and how she's done meticulous research to stay true to historical context and historical dialogue.
And it doesn't feel that way. Lightning is unimportant minus 2 scenes, the dialogues do not feel very regency-like (i've read other fics with much better writing), there's not enough propriety and MISS Bennet and even MR Darcy are often forgotten and are called Elizabeth/Darcy even when it's highly improper (along with many other things), there're many phrases used that are modern and most of "historical context" comes down to "interesting tidbits about love life of the English aristocracy" - which I admit is interesting, but it's not enough to make the story true to historical context or to make it an engaging read.
Darcy and Elizabeth's relationship is surprisingly NOT explored. They don't really talk. Lizzy keeps thinking of the Warm Darcy she meets in bed, and the Cold Darcy she encounters outside, but they don't really talk or sort out their differences. Even when it comes to Elizabeth's changing feelings about Darcy, it isn't explored how it came to be. Elizabeth's made some comments to Darcy that made it understood she didn't have a high opinion of him and that she thought Darcy had the same view about her, which left Darcy confused but didn't get him to have "the talk". MONTHS later "tolerable, i suppose" finally came up, but all we got is a brief apology with barely any dialogue. There was so little dialogue between Darcy&Elizabeth, they MOSTLY talked of bed-matters despite the story NOT being full of smut (I'm happy for it, the smut was very tame and rarely had more than one 4-line paragraph).
Elizabeth falls in love with Darcy because he's good in bed (and the bed-matters are not explored that much, we just know they have fun there). That's really it.
They're both very out of character.It's honestly sort of a body-horror. A poor gentlewoman is forced to abandon her morals and have marital relations with a man she hates, to birth his baby, all orchestrated by a woman who only sees her as a vessel and not a person. Elizabeth is abused in the story (even when the story DOESN'T make it look like she is). Anne made all the decisions for her, slowly grooming her into accepting Anne's plan for Lizzy's life. At first it was just "you have a baby and get out after a year", but actually Anne was leading her towards "You WILL stay with the babies, you WILL marry Darcy and you WILL become Mistress of Pemberley", without exploration how such manipulations made Lizzy feel. She wasn't an active person in her own story, things were DONE to her. Darcy&Anne were also constantly infringing on her bodily autonomy (BESIDES conspiring to put a baby in her), touching her without asking, and that made me feel disgusted, but it wasn't explored through Lizzy's lens.
(Immediately after birth)
"How do you feel?"
"Like I fell off a horse, every part of my body is sore"
"You know the best thing to do when you fall of a horse? To get back on". She groaned and pulled the coverlet up further when he realized exactly what he had suggested. Trying to retract, he quickly added, "but not right away, you need time to heal".
As I said, at parts it just feels like body horror, with Elizabeth being used and abused and not having ownership of her own body while other characters carelessly doing and saying stuff like that. And yet, she isn't contemplating her situation.There's also something akin to Colleen Hoover's "We looked at our son's big balls" which would make me vomit if it wasn't so funny because it sort of became "a meme".
-
Bookmark Tags:
-
Bookmark Tags: