The Knightly Situation

I love Emma the most out of all of Jane Austen's leading ladies. And I feel like she doesn't get the credit she deserves. Hell, even Jane Austen was worried that she was the only person that liked Emma. But that's part of how Emma has taken up such a large portion of my Austen-based love.

The other part is that I find Knightly, by far, the most interesting of Austen male leads. If you ask me, he's a lot more accessible as a character than Mr. Darcy or Edward Ferrars. I have a theory that Darcy is possibly on the autism spectrum for his inability to understand emotions. Edward is... kind of a confused sad puppy for most of Sense & Sensibility. 

But Mr. Knightly, I feel makes a tad more sense. Even the whole "fall in love with the girl fifteen years younger than you that you've always thought of as a sister" thing. Because he's more logical in working through his realization and I really respect that his big move, initially, was to remove himself from the situation completely and not fuck things up. He only finally gives in and admits his love when he finds out that Frank Churchill is no longer a concern when it comes to Emma and he admits his love while also having already come to terms with the very real possibility that she would not return the feelings.

I respect that in a man. Colonel Brandon was a similar type- willing to gracefully remove himself from the situation and being very stoic and manly about it. Which makes sense for Austen to write the older suitors for her leading ladies to be wiser yet silently suffering from heartache (especially Colonel Brandon).

And while the whole "known Emma her whole life"/"15-17 years her senior" thing has some ickiness to it, I also like that Knightly and Emma's story has a lot of history. They know each other ridiculously well and interact constantly throughout the book. You start to realize that at least part of why Emma has no desire to marry is because she already has a pseudo-marriage with Mr. Knightly. One of my favorite details in the 2009 BBC miniseries is when Mr. Knightly comments lightly that Emma looks so comfortable in Donwell Abbey that one would think she was its mistress. Because she really did seem that comfortable as she settled her father for his place at the party.

Also? Mr. Knightly is actually a nice person. Which I really don't feel I can say about Darcy all the time. Mr. Knightly was really trying to help out Robert Martin, he bothers to get to know Harriet and takes back his comments about her, he expresses concern for Jane Fairfax when she is not well, and he even solves the issue of how to make Mr. Woodhouse comfortable with the concept of Emma marrying. 

It also helps that Mr. Knightly is one of the few Austen men that has total control of his own life. Darcy has his aunt trying to control him, a sister to watch out for, and a scumbag of a former best friend all getting in his way. Edward has a terrible mother and sister in his way, as well as a long-term fiance that he's too nice to dump when he falls in love with someone else. Henry Tilney's father try a lot to control his life entirely. And Edmund Bertram is... in a book so boring I can't even finish the Billie Piper film version. Also: in love with his cousin. Even Colonel Brandon had his ward and her child to consider and care for.

But Mr. Knightly has no one to try to force him to do things he does not wish to do. His obstacles are just that the woman he loves possibly does not feel the same. 

I do wonder, however, that when he started to realize that part of his dislike of Frank came from a point of jealousy for Emma's attention, if Mr. Knightly had a giant, "OH SHIT" moment with himself. How do you come to terms with the fact that you're in love with the little girl from next door? With the younger sister of your sister-in-law? Or was it that over the years he kept trying to make himself not feel attracted to her, but when she finally seemed to be in love with someone, he couldn't take it anymore?

I always wanted to know more about the connection between the Knightly and Woodhouse families before the book began. More about why the Knightly boys were so comfortable being around Mr. Woodhouse and his family.

My other wonder is always if Mr. Knightly and Anne Taylor (later Anne Weston) ever considered each other. They're around the same age, were around each other constantly, and both have a strong sense of morality and loyalty. Or would their different statuses make it completely not even worth considering?

But I also wonder how well Mr. Knightly's marriage to Emma would go after the book ended. Would all that history, all that antagonistic back-and-forth, still come through every so often? Briefly forgetting "this is the person I married"? Emma wasn't even sure if she could ever call Mr. Knightly anything other than "Mr. Knightly", despite the change in their relationship. How much would actually change? Especially since they would still live at Hartfield with her father and he would probably like to pretend nothing had changed. Would just that aspect of it get in the way at times?

So, in conclusion: I think a lot about Mr. Knightly.

Austen Settee Limits: Austenland is Coming...

The Good: Keri Russell
The Bad: Producer Stephanie Meyer

The Good: J.J. Feild is always a great Austen-esque Male lead (see ITV's Northanger Abbey and- although it's not Austen- The BBC's The Ruby in the Smoke for further examples).
The Bad: I like Jennifer Coolidge, but I like her in small doses. This doesn't look like a small dosage.

The Good: Hey, it's based on a book that escaped my grasp! Something to read!
The Bad: Huh, the book description seems to have little in common with the movie trailer.

How do you feel about Austenland? Anyone see it at Sundance?

Austen Settee Limits: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries ended yesterday. Just shy of a year after it premiered, the 100th episode was released today and was a sweet send off to a beautiful re-incarnation of Jane Austen's beloved Elizabeth Bennet and her friends and family.

Now, it's one thing to just do a modernization of Pride & Prejudice- we've seen that. But The Lizzie Bennet Diaries was also an amazing display of telling a complex story in a minimal set-up. It was a professional production (most of the actors have popped up in commercials and episodic television) but kept expenses low and quality high. The episodes are all under ten minutes long, there's rarely more than three characters on screen in one episode, and the camera stays completely stationary. Editing was even kept to a minimum- ebbing away with each episode until there would only be a couple cuts in every installment. To promote the show and help grow a fanbase, twitter accounts were created for the characters and kept active to bridge the gaps between episodes each week. All 100 videos have hundreds of thousands of views within days of going up on YouTube.

And, even more impressive, they stuck to the plan to end it. Over the past few years as I've watched more and more foreign shows, I've become a big fan of shows that know when to quit and are written with a set finale in mind. One of the perks of being based on a classic story.

But most impressive was how they kept it interesting while still sticking to the blueprint of the original story. I started watching the show about two weeks after it premiered and barely a week went by since then when I didn't watch at least one episode. They really put some time and focus into how the various plots of the original story needed to be tweaked and twisted to reveal motives and add layers to a well known story to keep the viewers invested.

My Favorite Things About The Lizzie Bennet Diaries:

Charlotte. A character that often gets down-graded in adaptations to just "Elizabeth's not-pretty but practical friend that ends up married to Mr. Collins" and then, "plot device friend that Elizabeth stays with so that Darcy can confront her". In TLBD, Charlotte is finally given the treatment she deserves- remaining levelheaded but now she can reveal her sass and business savvy ways. No marriage necessary. No comments about her looks (considering how pretty Julia Cho is...). And plenty of on-camera compliments made towards her awesomeness. The friendship between Charlotte and Lizzie is the solid ground beneath the whole show and Charlotte is never gone for long, thankfully.

Lydia. The break-out star of the series was definitely Mary Kate Wiles's version of the indeed "energetic" Lydia Bennet.

But this is a Lydia that gets to also tell her side of the story for once. For better or worse. I had been waiting for ages to see what they would do to update Lydia's story and I was honestly taken by surprise at what direction it went in. They figured out a way to make the story fit with the limits of the series while also making it so they were able to show the emotional journey that Lydia ends up going on for the last half of the series. Lydia also had her own spin-off series to help set the scene for her eventual plotline, however there is a noticeable drop in the quality of writing compared to the main Lizzie story.

Costume Theater. Whenever Lizzie needed to discuss things that couldn't be shown somehow as a vlog or involved characters that weren't in on the project, Costume Theater was used to portray important off-camera events. Such a good little invention! Ashley Clements (Lizzie) and Julia Cho (Charlotte) get to play with being different characters and also show that they have a dynamic that life-long friends would have. It was a lot more effective than you would expect. Also, it's just silly fun. Apparently Mr. Bennet is one of the few people in the world that still smokes a pipe!

Additional Thoughts: I really loved watching the show and will be watching new shows from the same production team in the future. However, I had a lot of trouble watching the last handful of episodes- especially with Darcy in them. After 90+ episodes, they were finally starting to feel... voyeuristic. I don't deal well with romance. I'm sure for other people that all that stuff was awesome. Just not for me.

Speaking of Darcy: between this show and a lot of listening to the audiobook of P&P, I've started to suspect that Darcy is on the autism spectrum. 

He has trouble with empathy, difficulty starting conversations and with general social cues, doesn't understand or give out body language, and a habit of narrowing in on certain interests one at a time. I'll be talking about this a few more times as I go over more versions of the story but... yeah. I really think that might've been his problem all along and it wasn't until seeing this Darcy (who is called Darcy throughout the whole story, despite how everyone else, other than Fitz, goes by their first name) that it dawned on me. 

Anyway, if you haven't already watched the show, give it a try or hop over to the Kickstarter campaign for the dvd collection.

Austen Settee Limits: An Introduction

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single person in possession of a good obsession, must be in want of a life.

- An Invisible Robot Girl Misquoting A Lady

She started writing as a teenager. Her first known attempt to get published was just before she turned 22. The following year, she sold what would become Northanger Abbey to a local bookseller but it didn't get published. She continued to write.

Her first published book came out when she was 35.

By the time she turned 40, she had three popular novels published, a highly anticipated fourth novel on the way, and even the Prince Regent was a fan.

Then she started to show signs of illness. She continued to write. The fourth novel, Emma, was a hit. But her brothers soon lost all their money, which was helping to support her, her mother, and her sister. She continued to write, finishing a fifth novel, Persuasion, and starting a sixth.

She didn't finish the sixth novel. She didn't live to see her 42nd birthday.

Around what would've been her 42nd birthday, six months after her death,  Persuasion and, finally, Northanger Abbey were published. It was then that her name was put on one of her books for the first time.

A tragically short life for a woman that we're still talking about 200 years later.

 I've noticed that I've been a little... super fond, I guess, about some of my favorite Austen tv and film adaptations. And most nights when I'm trying to fall asleep, I do so while listening to an Austen audiobook. And have a few things to say about each and every one. So, I've decided  to make a regular feature on this blog be Austen Settee Limits. I'll write about the straight up adaptations, the modernized takes, the fanciful rewrites, and even some comic books and web series (you're watching the Lizzie Bennet Diaries on YouTube, right?).

Any suggestions on where I should start the discussion?