ellynnever-sweet

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i don’t mean to brag but we have the best prime minister in the entire world 🥺😌

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In which Elizabeth (technically) meets a disagreeable man, and Mrs Bennet struts her stuff. 

7,318 words, kids.

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In which Lydia runs riot, Elizabeth has literary opinions, and Miss Bennet and Mr Bingley are exceedingly pleased with each other.

(also: in which Darcy is mentioned, though not by name, and Lizzy roasts him sight-unseen)

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Chapter three of Certain Arts and Allurements, in which the Bennets gossip, eat, and bicker.

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The baptism of Miss Georgiana Darcy provides an opportunity for the Grandes Dames of Georgian politics to get together to talk shop and plan their children’s futures.

A one-short prequel to the main fic of Certain Arts and Allurements, featuring three Georgianas, two Harriets, two Annes, two Carolines, two Williams, two Georges, one Catherine, and a very overwhelmed eleven year old Fitzwilliam Darcy (and his daemon).

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Chapter two of Certain Arts and Allurements now up, because I won’t be defeated by some wind and branches. 

In which the Bennets throw a party, and a certain young man expresses an interest in taking an estate in Hertfordshire.

CW: this contains a very brief mention of suicide by an unnamed OC who is the subject of gossip. 

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In the mid-1700s, Mr Gardiner, country attorney, made an ambitious visit to the continent in the service of his patron, and came back, most unexpectedly, with a beautiful foreign bride. A little more than three decades later, the widow Gardiner left Meryton for good, taking her son to sea and leaving her two daughters to their husbands.

A little more than twenty years later, Mrs Bennet, by then a gentlewoman by marriage, accepts her mother’s offer to augment the merger dowries of her five daughters, on condition that they finish their educations under her guidance, only to find that Jane Bennet returns quite changed.

A Pride and Prejudice fic set in an alternate universe in which Austen’s England is infused with magic systems heavily influenced by those of His Dark Materials and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, where the Bennet sisters are descended on one side from a line of English country squires and the other from matriarchal northern witches. Featuring very occasional cameos from the cast of JS&MR, and a menagerie of original daemons to delight and amuse.

This fic can be read independently of the previous works in the series.

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writing snippet

So I was working out a sort of side bit for Certain Arts and Allurements featuring a bickering young Darcy and Wickham with their unsettled daemons, and I wrote something that accidentally sums up quite a large part of my understanding of Darcy. Can’t resist putting it up here, because god only knows when it’ll actually see the light of AO3 as a finished bit.

George stormed away. Fitzwilliam hesitated, and then went to follow him, but Inès darted in front of him, a porcupine again with huge spines that wavered unpredictably in his face. He glared at her back, wanting to kick her. ‘You look stupid. Like a thorn bush.’

‘Good,’ she declared, just as mulishly. ‘I like being a thorn bush.’

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Update! Placeholder URL for this sideblog is now @ellynnever-sweet, follow me over at @ellynneversweet for my new main. I'll probably (?) copy over posts depending on the level of work involved.

tumblr housekeeping

FYI I’m busy setting up a new tumblr, because this is presently a sideblog and it drives me batty not being able to like, respond to or follow fandom blogs from here. There are a few people  who follow my main that I don’t want to see my writing, so there. I’ll update when I change the URLs over.

[ellynnever-sweet]

tumblr housekeeping

FYI I’m busy setting up a new tumblr, because this is presently a sideblog and it drives me batty not being able to like, respond to or follow fandom blogs from here. There are a few people  who follow my main that I don’t want to see my writing, so there. I’ll update when I change the URLs over.

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adaptations/retellings of pride and prejudice that change mr. darcy’s first name to make it more palatable are WEAK. CALL HIM FITZWILLIAM YOU COWARDS.

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A theory: men can write from a female perspective convincingly, but only as long as they insist on writing them acting like regular people and forget the characters are, in fact, women. As soon as they write women doing or thinking ‘girl stuff’ (romantic relationships, female friendships, managing their appearance) they stop writing people who happen to be women and start writing caricatures of What Men Think Women Think.

I have a further thought on male authors reading that Margaret Atwood quote about how being a women is like being your own voyeur and accordingly writing female perspectives as reviews by the internal imaginary male audience instead of the character-as-performer reacting to the imaginary audience, but...that’s clunky.

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“She’s fascinating: endlessly complicated, mysterious, enigmatic and dangerous. She’s described as a cesspit of moral filth in the third book, and the mother of all evil. And I thought, there’s no way I can turn this opportunity down.” Ruth Wilson as Marisa Coulter, His Dark Materials

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I still love Alice though. She’s the real MVP.

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I am all for healthy and consensual age gaps - I’d be a great big hypocrite if I wasn’t and it is hard to shock me, bring it on - but one of my rules of thumb is, 

if the elder character changed the younger character’s nappies when they were a baby, then no. Just, no.

*side-eyes The Secret Commonwealth like stink*

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I do buy Serafina Pekkala/Farder Coram though (and, for that matter, Serafina/Lee Scoresby). Possibly because those relationships are only ever implied.

I’m increasingly convinced that Phillip Pullman can’t write romance to save himself, even though his eternal thesis seems to be (romantic) love will save the world. ‘These two people are straight, so naturally they made out with a grimly overwhelming passion.’*

Where’s the interaction? Where’s the acquaintance, the actual liking of each other’s company? Where the hell’s the flirting?

*passion being his go-to word for any emphatically-felt emotion. Please get a thesaurus.

[ellynnever-sweet]

I’m increasingly convinced that Phillip Pullman can’t write romance to save himself, even though his eternal thesis seems to be (romantic) love will save the world. ‘These two people are straight, so naturally they made out with a grimly overwhelming passion.’*

Where’s the interaction? Where’s the acquaintance, the actual liking of each other’s company? Where the hell’s the flirting?

*passion being his go-to word for any emphatically-felt emotion. Please get a thesaurus.