Tag: romance

Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 7

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For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude didn’t do great on the first draft of this scene, with a serious overuse of the word “particular,” and no inclusion of Marianne to speak of. For draft 2 I prompted it to address those issues along with some more minor stuff (Morin’s backstory and height, Edward joining the party later in the scene. Draft 3 was basically me wanting it to reposition a certain paragraph about Morin’s reactions to Marianne chatting up his ward, and being too lazy to do it myself.

Meeting Colonel Morin and Élise

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Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 6

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For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude did very well on its first draft, but then I realized Edward needed to be present, so I asked for a redraft. I deleted a sentence and a half about Marianne that were not justified by her behavior in the story so far, and I deleted a sentence about Henry Dashwood’s judgment of people late in the scene. “He was a better man etc” is something I wrote to replace it.

The New Cottage

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Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 5

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For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude did very well on its first draft. For the redraft, I asked it to rework an incoherent description of what the Dashwoods’ mother was doing with her hands during the cart ride, and have Marianne show more emotion. My instinct is that free women of color in this time and place would not have survived long, if they showed the overwrought behavior that Marianne and her mother do in the Austen novel. But Marianne isn’t Marianne if she isn’t the most emo person in any given room. Then I realized this was the right time to introduce Edward, and that led to two more drafts. I manually removed an em-dash rather than ask for another draft.

Journey to Faubourg Marigny

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Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 4

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For the origins of this project, see previous posts in “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude’s first draft was fairly satisfactory on this one, and draft two was me asking for em-dash removal and sentence level fixes in a few places where the AI’s lack of logic became obvious. The words “with her [Frances’s] advice” are mine. I didn’t like what Claude had there but couldn’t justify mucking around with a third draft for it.

Planning the Departure

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Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 3

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For more information about this project, please see past posts under the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude, amazingly, got through draft 1 with no em-dashes! I asked for a rephrase of one sentence that felt anachronistic to me, and to break down a loooong sentence that ended this scene in draft 1. Otherwise draft 2, which you see here, is much what draft 1 was. I did realize at the last minute that this needed to come before the first Marianne POV, even though the latter was written first, and adjusted the scheduling accordingly. I haven’t had much reason to quarrel with these early setup scenes, but we will see how Claude does once the romance arcs start.

Letter from Mrs. Jennings

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Austenian: Harriet Smith and the Case of the Missing Parents

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Let’s get the book’s official statement on the subject out of the way first. Late in the novel, Harriet’s father is stated to be a tradesman, marital status unknown, who is “rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been hers, and decent enough to have always wished for concealment.” Her father approves of the match with Robert Martin, and there’s a suggestion he possibly settles money on Harriet on her marriage. Nothing is said of the mother. I personally do not think Harriet is related to anyone we meet in the book. No named character in the book is high enough in status to weather the scandal of being known to have fathered or given birth to an illegitimate child. This doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have done it, just that they wouldn’t have kept the child, and the accompanying risk of gossip and scandal, in the neighborhood of Highbury. However, the alternative theories are potentially of interest to people writing Jane Austen spinoffs, so let’s go over them. You’ll notice I don’t really address the question of whether particular character seem moral/immoral enough for certain behaviors; a lifetime of reading murder mysteries makes me unwilling to go that route in discussing what fictional people are capable of.

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Austenian: The Parents of Emma Woodhouse, and Their Friends, The Knightleys

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A quick Gutenberg skim on my part showed no days-of-week directly linked to days-of-month in the text, such as seen in P&P or Mansfield. Jo Modert, whose work I do not have direct access to, says that the main events of Emma seem to be mapped to an almanac for 1814-1815. Ellen Moody, after citing Modert, maps the novel instead to 1813-1814, for reasons that are not obvious to me. The only cultural reference known to point to anything earlier is Miss Bates getting confused about whether Ireland counts as a separate kingdom or not. Miss Bates is both ditzy and insular, so her continuing to get confused on this point long after it was a topical issue is plausible. Thus, this cultural reference doesn’t really wed Emma to a particular timeframe the way the soldiers billeted upon Meryton does with P&P. For once, I’m accepting Moody’s calendar without modifications. Mostly because I really don’t care that much about this novel, which weds considerable brilliance of technique, mood and psychology to two fairly unpleasant heroines, manipulative Emma Woodhouse and self-martyring Jane Fairfax. The only female characters in this one that I am at all fond of are Miss Bates and Harriet Smith.

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Sense and Sensibility 2026? Wut?

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(Note: a previous version of this post assumed screenwriter Diana Reid was the TV director from Handmaid’s Tale. It appears screenwriter Diana Reid is instead the novelist of that name. This post has been revised accordingly.)

Daisy Edgar-Jones, whom some people were hyping as a potential Lizzie Bennet in the Netflix Pride and Prejudice before Emma Corrin got the role, has been cast as Elinor in a new S&S adaptation.

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