Mebediel

here she is insisting on performing at a party in an effort to quite blatantly show off ("Elizabeth was in agonies" lmfao):

just to pull the most significant line: "such an opportunity of exhibiting was delightful to her" (emphasis mine)

here she is saying that most girls are boring and basic and thus uninteresting to her:

here she is reacting to lydia's elopement with a moral judgment on female virtue:

(for context, this is literally right after they find out lydia's run off and everyone's freaking out about where she is and if they've married or not)

and here's her ending, in which austen basically says that now that she's the last unmarried daughter she kind of has to socialize more, but now that her sisters aren't around to make her feel insecure she's fine with it:

(all text from the gutenberg project)

and i mean. there's nothing wrong with changing a character for your own purposes when you do spin-off/adaptations/reimaginings like this. but i think it's a fundamental misreading of the text to claim that mary is the overlooked, ignored sister, because she's not as pretty or charming as her sisters. austen is very clear that mary herself knows that she's not as conventionally beautiful, and as a result has wildly overcompensated by competing with everyone around her to constantly be the most intelligent in the room. mary is, in her own way, as rude as lydia and kitty. she's portrayed as rather obtuse, insensitive, insufferable. and she's definitely not quiet or shy, which is where the other bennet sister really loses me lol.

it's like the "i'm not like other girls" trope blown up and portrayed as empowering, but that's really still what it is, at its heart. and i, personally, just find that rather boring. like if it were me, i'd want to read a love story about this mary, who's purposefully oblivious to social graces and sort of impolitely blunt and judgmental and antisocial. she's great fun, when she shows up randomly to just say something incredibly insensitive and then disappear again - it's really so funny.

and this is one of my favorite moments, also:

mary thinking that mr. collins would be a fine husband to have because he's definitely smarter than her sisters, but he'd have to study very hard and catch up to her level so he can have a hope to be as smart as she is. like, that's hysterical. she's fucking hilarious. but also think about that for a second: austen is comparing mary to mr. collins, but she's saying mary is worse, lmfao

of course this is a very pointed satire of a very context-dependent sort of personality, which in regency novels are often referred to dismissively as "bluestockings." feminist scholars have debated mary bennet for a long time, over how to take this exaggerated portrayal of a female intellectual, and i think you're free to take your own reading of it from our modern perspective, about a young girl who's acutely aware of her beauty (or lack of it), and how she reacts to the culture she's raised in as a result. i think a feminist reimagining of mary would be amazing, but personally i don't think the way to do it is to round off her sharp edges and turn her into a poor sad neglected nerd girl. (like, if i can think of any direct parallel to mary, it's not elizabeth or charlotte, it's caroline bingley. you know, the other character who expresses her insecurity by projecting superiority constantly?) that's not at all who she is, and i don't think it's particularly empowering to sand down a female character into something more palatable in order to give her her own story. that, on principle, offends me a little.

Terry Pratchett, in a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien, 22 November 1967

Thank you very much for your letter. The first one that I have received with regard to Smith of Wootton Major. You evidently feel about the story very much as I do myself. I can hardly say more.

—Yes."

Chapter One: In Which Sophie Talks to Hats

In 2020, and again in the University, for my Illustration class, I decided to do my 3rd attempt of the first chapter illustration for a project.

Again, with the aesthetics of the film, but with much better watercolor and drawing skills!

Yes, when I started to try to illustrate HMC with the aesthetics of the film, I also created an obsession with the Victorian period and I almost got bonkers investigating the fashion of the time and every detail 🫠👍🏻✨

It's been 6 years since this watercolour, and now I can appreciate how good it was :')

Of course, now can be better, but for that it will need to wait a tiny bit more 😉

PS: I added a few scans and photos of the process that I found that could be interesting to see!

1. gideon the ninth

2. two week break. must wait the full two weeks to allow for proper marination. DO NOT wait longer than two weeks

3. first two chapters of harrow the ninth

4. quick skim of gideon the ninth to provide reassurance that you didn’t accidentally forget the whole plot

5. the rest of harrow the ninth

6. as yet unsent

7. two week break

8. gideon the ninth

9. the extras at the end of the gideon the ninth paperback, which you technically skimmed the first time but deemed unimportant and extraneous

10. as yet unsent

11. harrow the ninth

12. the mysterious study of doctor sex, which you just learned exists

13. two week break

14. nona the ninth

15. the unwanted guest

16. the chapter of nona the ninth relevant to the unwanted guest

17. rinse and repeat until alecto the ninth drops

@oldguardians making this answer a separate post because it’s kind of interesting*!

‘‘I cannot bear to hear that mentioned. Pray do not talk of that odious man. I do think it is the hardest thing in the world, that your estate should be entailed away from your own children; and I am sure if I had been you, I should have tried long ago to do something or other about it.’’

Jane and Elizabeth attempted to explain to her the nature of an entail. They had often attempted it before, but it was a subject on which Mrs. Bennet was beyond the reach of reason; and she continued to rail bitterly against the cruelty of settling an estate away from a family of ve daughters, in favour of a man whom nobody cared anything about.”

(In the interest of not getting bogged down in legal minutiae, I’ll keep this pretty general. Please note that I am vastly oversimplifying some legal concepts here for the sake of explaining the issue clearly. If you’re an attorney/barrister/whatever, don’t @ me - I KNOW it’s all much more nuanced than this.)

Pride & Prejudice is set somewhere around 1811. In the novel, the Bennets’ ownership interest in the family estate is famously said to be “entailed” away from the Bennet girls in favor of their cousin, Mr. Collins. This is specifically explained to be because Mr. Bennet has no sons, and thus his estate reverts back to his closest male relative.

In the real world, entailment could (and usually did) work that way. But there is an enormous, glaring issue: English entailments have long been very VERY easy to defeat** through a remedy called Common Recovery. If Longbourn was truly entailed away from the female descendants, as the novel indicates, Mr. Bennet could have hired an attorney (his brother-in-law?) to start the Common Recovery process at any time. Within a few months, the court would render a judgment giving Mr. Bennet the property outright and free from any entailment, allowing him to leave the property to his daughters upon his death*** and make them independently wealthy women. And this wasn’t just a possibility - it was a very common legal mechanism that would have been almost expected of a gentleman interested in preserving his family’s comfort. There are hundreds of cases in the English Chancery records (featuring many families that were much less wealthy than the Bennets!) invoking this very remedy whenever fathers failed to produce sons.

So entailment makes no sense - it had basically no power over landowners by the Regency Period.

Let’s talk alternatives. In 1811, the primary way of keeping property in the male line was through another estate planning technique called strict settlement. To GREATLY simplify a complicated form of ownership, strict settlement had the present possessor of property always hold a life estate interest (they own it only until their death), with their male primogeniture descendants holding a remainder fee tail interest (read: eventual outright ownership upon their father’s death). Each generation of life estate owner would then force their young male descendants (the fee tail owner) upon their coming of age to give the young descendant’s unknown future male sons the remainder interest, retaining a life estate for themselves (which they would receive upon their father’s death). Thus the ownership system perpetuates down a male line of descendants, each generation demanding the same restrictive ownership system of their own children.

If you followed that - and I don’t blame you if you didn’t, as this is all very deliberately obtuse - you might think “wait okay. That kind of sounds like the Bennets’ situation. Austen called it an entailment but maybe it was actually a strict settlement!” Several academics have tried to argue that, but it also fails for several reasons:

(1) With the Bennets’ seemingly comfortable current income, strict settlement would have provided for significant lifetime income + dowries for Mr. Bennet’s female descendants. But in P&P, it’s made very clear that the girls’ only possible inheritance is a tiny amount from their mother’s side and nothing from their father’s. If they do not marry, they will be destitute. That is extremely unlikely and would be very shameful in strict settlement ownership..

(2) It would have been inconceivable for Mr. Bennet’s father to have forced him to benefit a cousin over his own descendants, even if they were women. One of the fundamental points of strict settlement was to avoid this outcome (aka to avoid the entailment system). People did NOT want a distant male cousin to inherit property simply because there wasn’t a primogeniture male descendant - they knew that if anything, their own female descendants could always produce a male heir in their marriages. Plus, Mr. Bennet’s and Mr. Collin’s fathers apparently hated each other (ref Mr. Collins’ initial letter) - why would Mr. Bennet’s father force his son to benefit the son of a man he himself hates?

(3) For many many other reasons, a strict settlement does not match how the family talks about/treats the estate in the novel. There’s literally a whole law review article on this topic (cited below), and I’ll defer to that for a full discussion.

So we’re left with two possibilities: the land is entailed, and for some reason Mr. Bennet isn’t willing to pay a small amount in attorney’s fees to undo the entailment for the enormous benefit of his daughters (extremely unlikely, robs the story of all its tension), or the land is subject to a bizarre + shameful strict settlement that goes directly against everything that would have been normal at the time, and none of the characters know that (makes no sense in the story).

And then, of course, there’s the truth: the “entailment” is simply a narrative device that does not reflect actual law or historical transfer of property at death, which is perfectly fine. Jane Austen was not writing a law textbook or even a legal drama. And her underlying point remains clear: Regency-era women were often in economically precarious positions and forced to marry to maintain their social and economic standings.

((If you do want a version in your head that works under the law, maybe we imagine that Mr. Collin’s father actually owned the home but was in debt to Mr. Bennet so he gave him some kind of strange lifelong leasehold interest with income from the property included. And then we ignore the passage saying Mr. Bennet having a son would have “avoided” the home passing to Mr. Collins + pretend that the family lied to everybody about the home being entailed to save face))

For additional reading, I highly recommend A FUNHOUSE MIRROR OF LAW: THE ENTAILMENT IN JANE AUSTEN’S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by Peter A. Appel (linked). His analysis reflects my own reading of Regency inheritance law, and I think his conclusions are generally sound. There is significant other scholarship on this subject, but I find Appel’s work the most persuasive.

—-

* At least to me, who admittedly studies this for a living

** For fun War of the Roses reasons!

We know he is not cruel, and there is substantial textual evidence that he is not completely negligent either. Upon Lydia's "elopement", Mr. Bennett immediately leaves to deal with the problem and is shown to be highly conscientious of the economics and social politics of the situation. He also is implied to have discussed quite frankly with Elizabeth the economics of saving for their allowances and dowries, suggesting that these issues are at least on his radar and he’s looked at how to remedy them.

In doing this kind of litcrit, you have to look a bit closer and more critically than accepting the trope. Yes, he is somewhat absent from his family, but he is never written to be a cruel man. And in the full context of probate law at that time, you will see that a failure to provide in this way would likely have been considered cruel and wholly unacceptable for a genteel father of five daughters. And there is no textual evidence for Mr. Bennett acting that way.

"The hearts of men are easily corrupted." Wake Up Dead Man (2025) & Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Bonus for @mykingdomforasong:

In Knives Out, a compassionate, ethical young woman treats everyone around her with generosity, and the people around her repeatedly try to take advantage of her kindness to force her into losing the fortune that was gifted to her by a dear friend. There, justice means that she keeps the fortune and decides that actually, she doesn't have to be kind and giving to people who've proven themselves assholes.

In Glass Onion, a woman loses her sister to a gang of wealthy, successful people who've sacrificed their principles for the sake of ambition and ego. There, justice means that everyone involved will be made notorious: whatever their other accomplishments, they will forever be known for being complicit in the burning of the most famous painting in history.

In Wake Up Dead Man, the church takes advantage of a young girl's loyalty and faith to place her under a lifelong burden and fill her with guilt, shame, and hatred. Justice means helping her understand what was done to her and the women around her, and giving her compassion so she can find peace.

This is cool because it means the movies contradict each other! The compassionate justice of Wake Up Dead Man would be totally misplaced in Knives Out, and so would the toppling-monuments justice of Glass Onion. And because each movie has something different to say, they all stand on their own and feel fresh.