SLOW OF WIT (and a ramble about Fanfiction)

Good morning everyone!

For 2020 I've decided to polish off some of my old stories and move them from my 'WIP' folder to 'Finished'. While looking through them I found a draft for a Pride and Prejudice fic called 'Slow of Wit' that I wrote in my teens. It's a retelling of the classic story from the point of view of the officious, arrogant Mary. I enjoyed re-reading it this week and thought that you guys might like it, so I'll post a chapter here every week as I rewrite it.

I was quite surprised to see a booming market for Austen fanfiction on the Kindle store!

I think that the traditional reaction to fanfic as badly written, gratuitous nonsense has eroded over time. When I was younger everyone shared fics like the infamous My Immortal. If your teacher asked you what you wrote over the weekend, you'd say 'a story' and never 'a fanfic'. One would get the nod of approval: well done! It's important to get your mind racing and your fingers moving! It's good to see people using their imagination instead of just staring at the telly. Fanfiction? What a waste of time! You're not using your imagination. You're a copycat. You're stealing other people's characters. They've done the hard work. You're too lazy to come up with your own ideas(!)

I grew up writing fanfiction. I was smitten with the Tortall universe by the wonderful Tamora Pierce, the Final Fantasy worlds and anything the Jim Henson studio produced. My brother and I shared a fanfiction.net account, which made reading the reviews a little less scary. At first we got a LOT of flack. Our OC were one dimensional, our grammar was atrocious and the less said about our fight scenes, the better. We treated the site and the community as a way to get feedback and learn. Nobody expected us to be good, and the community didn't present themselves as experts.

The difference between the publishing world and that is night and day. As 'proper' writing looms, so too does the idea of the omniscient critic, the judgemental eye and imposter syndrome's sticky fingers. You apply that mindset to the things you read. I go into a fanfiction ready to ignore mistakes and overlook plot holes. If I buy a novel, I find the same things hugely distracting.

So, as I said, I was surprised to find a successful fanfiction community among the published authors on Amazon. One of them is in fact one of my favourite authors. Joan Aiken wrote The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, a novel I studied when I was in middle school in the 90s. Her book The Stolen Lake is, in essence, a steampunk sequel to the legend of King Arthur. Yes, you read that right. It's fantastically done, creepy as hell, and well worth the read. She was also a renowned Austen scholar and wrote books such as Jane Fairfax, a retelling of Emma from the perspective of Emma's perceived social rival.

What I enjoy about Aiken's Austen is the style she uses. I have read a lot of Austen fanfiction. Many writers try to recreate the style of the original books. I could fill another ten blog posts ranting about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which falls into the same trap. The idea is that we are reading Austen herself, and that she has created an alternate universe or sequel to the stories we love. Unfortunately, contemporary plots tend to shy away from social commentary, witty asides and anecdotal events.

They cannot recreate the position Austen was writing from: as a woman, as a spinster, as someone who is aware of the political tension overseas but doesn't overplay it, who reads Gothic novels affectionately, who can write parody without pastiche, and so on. Where contemporary retellings often fall short is by being over-conscious of these facets, and making them too much of a feature.

I remember my English teacher explaining that George Wickham was a particularly deplorable character not just because of his lechery, but because he was gallivanting in England while other soldiers were dying in France. It's a detail which is not highlighted in the novel, it merely exists. I have read fanfiction where there is a very comprehensive military history, which takes the style of the work into the realm of Thackery rather than Austen. The levels just aren't right. Austen is resilient but oh-so-very-delicately poised.

Confession time! I have a soft spot for really cheesy, over-the-top retellings that throw Austen's style to the wind. Here are the characters, here are the people who you want to see, now let's throw it at the wall and see what sticks! My affection began with the book The Independance of Mary Bennet which begins with pirates and somehow keeps going. Recently I've read Mr. Darcy, Vampire. It's compulsively readable and hugely flawed, but as a quick read it works. Books like that feel like they're written by people who just wanted to enjoy themselves. I like that.

While P&P and Zombies has a similarly irrelevant theme, the style of it tries to reflect Austen's writing and falls short. It would have worked better, in my biased opinion, if the whole text had been written in the author's own voice. It's like Laurence Olivier doing slapstick. It just doesn't gel.

Which brings me to my own fanfiction. Feel free to tear it to pieces! I wrote it because I wanted to read it. It falls into basically every trap I've just complained about, and more! Perhaps my dislike of people mimicking style arose from how difficult I found it when I wrote this monster!

Not put off? Here's Chapter One. I will be posting them onto their own subpage from week 2.

Slow Of Wit

It was no great surprise to any of the assembled women that Elizabeth was the one to respond. Mary in particular had been waiting for it, keenly aware that as soon as their esteemed mother had finished speaking, her second daughter would be ready with a quick witticism on her lips. And what a reply! She looked archly at their father before she said:

“It seems a single man in possession of a great fortune must be in want of a wife!”

Mr. Bennet hid a smile, Jane sighed and the two youngest looked confused.

Of all of them it was Mary who understood it best. When her oblivious mother began wittering on again about the new tenants of the great hall, she privately pondered that she and Lizzie might have been great friends, had not her own sense of humour been so lacking that she saw such comments as rude rather than entertaining.

Mary’s laughter, Lydia had once said snidely, was as slow and stumbling as her very tongue.

That, too, was true. Mary had no reply. If she wished to say something sensible she did not know how, and as so often happened she ended in silence, much as she had begun.

Mary did not laugh slowly. It was an odd noise, indeed: a low, groaning hum of sound which appeared forced from her grudging lips until it died, withering away rather than ending as if the offended ears of those around the girl had put in some complaint. If Mary felt the need to laugh – which was rarely – she covered her mouth with her hands and muffled the sound. Generally, the company would ask her if she was suffering from indigestion.

“N- no,” she would stumble, and redden, and look away from the scornful glances of her sisters. “I d-don’t, thank y-you for enqui-qui-quiring, ma…ma’am.”

When she was ten years old her mother had given her teaching into the hands of Jane and Elizabeth with two commands: one, that they should attempt to shape their sister into a shadow of the elegant manners and graces which she herself had taught to her eldest children. Two, that they should do something about her unfortunate habit of stuttering. It was, Mrs Bennet declared, most unbecoming.

“Well!” Lizzie had declared, “I fear to say that we have been given an impossible task!”

“Now, Lizzie.” Jane had an odd strength in her gentleness back then, before years of pampering had taught her to be softer and more obliging in all respects. “She only struggles when she is nervous, you know.”

“But she is always so!”

The eldest sisters schemed together, and after some deliberation arrived at a plan which they quickly put into action. Mary could not engage in the quick to-and-fro of polite company, or even hold a conversation without some unfortunate mishap in her speech. However, she had a keen mind and a good musical ear, and so the sisters enthused upon the tomes of verse and philosophy which they discovered in their father’s library.

“You must learn these, and be quite correct.” Jane smiled as she handed the stack of books to her sister. “If you cannot think of a reply, my love, then at least you can remember what someone else might have said, if placed at your table.”

“There’s so m-many of them!” Mary wailed, and coughed fitfully at the dusty leaves.

“If it is too difficult, then you could learn how to speak properly.” Lizzie had still never warmed to her task, and the fact that her sister plainly could not see the genius in her clever plan made her cruel. Mary blushed and fled.

Now, several years later, if anyone remembered that Mary Bennet stuttered then they did not mention it. She could recall hundreds of ancient, dead voices at a moment’s notice (sometimes it took her longer, for she had no natural skill for it) and sometimes it passed for conversation. Often, though, it simply made her envy the unstudied ease which even her youngest sisters possessed.

Still, if words came slowly to her lips, she prided herself, then at least she was also slower than her sisters at being foolish. When her father described them all as the silliest girls in the county, he was not incorrect.

“Will he be bearing regimentals?” Lydia was asking, excitement clear in her luminous gaze. Her mother made a frustrated noise, and Jane gently pointed out that a man with such a large fortune hardly needed to take a commission. The young addressee pouted out her lower lip and fell into silence, but with her the action was grudging and easily broken.

“Will he be interested in Jane, do we think, or Lizzie?”

“Hush, child.” Mrs Bennet flapped her hands impatiently at her favourite. “You must not say such things-!”

“But mother, do not you recall that you yourself..?”

“It is the height of bad manners to recall the past.” The woman said stiffly, and swept to her feet in a flutter of taffeta lace. “Especially if it is not your own!”

Having made such a declaration, the good lady hastened to the bell cord and summoned Hill to her side. In quick order she addressed the servant to make haste into town, and to summon the dressmaker to attend to the older Miss Bennets at his soonest convenience.

If the esteemed gentleman was to be interested in anyone, it seemed, his interest would be encouraged by the height of whatever fashions the country considered correct. The city’s opinion, naturally, was not consulted.

Mary hardly dared to raise her eyes to her mother’s, for once the woman began making arrangements her mind tended to flit ahead, and soon she was asking her husband if he would spare a little more pin money for her dear Lydia, “For she is quite as handsome as the elders, and may hold her own very nicely, I’m sure, if presented in just the right shade of…”

Against her father’s increasingly heated refusals, Mary looked back down at her book and thought that, all things considered, Plato was a far more entertaining read than many of the dry scriptures she had recently inherited from a distant clerical cousin. His books smelled of dust and made her think of other forms of decay, which surely was quite the wrong thing to dwell upon when ones thoughts should be raised to the heavens.

Plato, she thought, had died long before the Christ child was even a whisper in prophecy. He had written even before Mary’s favourite scripture, which she had always considered so sacrosanct that it was timeless. When God said ‘let there be light’, she thought, he had also known that one day one of the many girls called Mary would need to read the words that Moses uttered: ‘I am slow of tongue’.

Mary pondered these notions because they were far simpler than the insults she could not dwell upon. Why, when her eldest sisters were dressed in their finest, did her mother’s mind slide past her middle child so easily? Why was Lydia bedecked in her mother’s jewels before Mary was even asked what colour stone would bring out her eyes?

Why had her parents allowed something as simple as a stumbling tongue to build a wall between their own passions and those of their child?

Why, in short, was Mary so unloved?