#austentime

[anghraine]

Why P&P 1790s? I'm familiar with its writing history, so I know it's one of two plausible periods, but I prefer thinking about it as 1810s. OTOH, how much of my preference was unconsciously formed by actual publication date or by the adaptations (especially 1995) I don't know, so I'm open to your argument for the 1790s.

ETA: I do have another, probably more coherent, post about this here, but I rambled about it again anyway.

Partly it's similarly subjective, to be sure. I don't like the identification of Austen with the Regency when she did so much work before it. I don't like the 1995 P&P or its stranglehold on Austen fanon. I don't like post-Regency fashion and don't want to inflict it on 30- and 40-something Elizabeth and Jane, lol. And I simply find the eighteenth century more engaging than the nineteenth (I started my PhD program intending to study both, as I did in my MA, and ended up gleefully escaping into studying early modern+long 18th-century British lit instead).

I also find the eighteenth century more pertinent to Austen and particularly to her earlier novels, in addition to finding it more personally engaging. And more vaguely, those earlier novels—S&S, P&P, and NA—feel to me like they exist in a significantly different and earlier world than Persuasion or Sanditon do.

The cultural referents in her earlier work can be a bit of a jumble, to be sure. And I think it's clear that Austen didn't want any of her published work to feel out of date, but at the same time, didn't want to overhaul those works to the point that they were no longer recognizable in essentials. This is most glaring an issue with Northanger Abbey (NA without Udolpho??), but even little things like Marianne's hair or Mr Bennet's powdering-gown just seem to fit best with a c. 1790s setting.

Those kinds of things can be fanwanked into "Austentime"— the popular, vaguely 1810s setting as depicted in most Austen adaptations and related genre conventions (there's an article about this that I've been trying and failing to dig up, but that's how I always think of that sort of amorphously Regency setting now). But the explanations for the little details being totally 1810s details do feel like fanwank to me.

And of course, the militia subplots in P&P seem clearly influenced by the 1790s militias and the Brighton camp that closed shortly before Austen started writing P&P. The Broadview edition of P&P, for instance, unhesitatingly dates P&P to the 1790s based on that.

I've talked before about other specifics that IMO align better with the 1790s than 1810s, too, and I do stand by those. But for me, the strongest reason for my personal preference is that feeling that P&P and Persuasion/Sanditon are not happening at anywhere near the same cultural moment. While P&P is very different from S&S and NA, they strike me as much more akin in this sense than any of them are to the late novels, and to me, it makes the most sense to place them at or near their original creation to both fit the 1790s vibes I get from them and to gain some distance from the late works.