In Essentials (Much As It Ever Was), by Vangie

The premise of In Essentials: the summer before the Netherfield party’s arrival in Meryton, Elizabeth visits Pemberley, while Mrs Younge dies in the middle of the Ramsgate affair. In consequence, each of the familiar plot points is turned on its head, even while the story stays firmly on the tracks of the original novel.

Why you should read this: You like nice, readable AUs. You’re intrigued by the idea of how P&P might actually have gone without Elizabeth’s snap misjudgment. You like a practically perfect Elizabeth.

Why you might not like this: You like Darcy and Elizabeth’s respective merits and misdeeds to more or less balance out. You prefer your love stories to carefully detail why and when the characters fell for each other. You really think Darcy and Elizabeth would have had a nice, smooth courtship if not for her prejudices.

Regency, AU, General, Complete at DWG

This story has been strangely difficult to judge. I re-read it several months ago, but every time I tried to start this review, I ended up staring at my monitor, saying, “Huh.” For me, In Essentials is very likable and very annoying at the same time.

Easily the most common kind of story in Austen fandom is the “what-if” AU, which rather than supposing that the universe is different in some fundamental way, merely asks what would have happened if the story had gone down a different fork (or, as in this case, multiple forks) in the road. Some fics are willing to turn off onto a completely different path from the original, but the traditional format essentially retells the original story with a twist. As one might imagine from the title, In Essentials doesn’t so much fall into this category as epitomize it.

The basic idea is that Elizabeth’s first impression of Darcy is the one she gets from Mrs Reynolds: that is, extremely positive. However, she’s no less biased than in canon; the difference is that she’s now biased as strongly in his favour as she was biased against him originally. She closes her eyes to his very evident character flaws and readily makes allowances for him, easily falling in love. In fact, she falls so easily for him that it’s not really clear why. It just happens. There’s no real exploration of her reasons for liking him, much less falling in love, beyond her bias–but, to be fair, the story isn’t about that. It’s important that Elizabeth falls for Darcy, not how or why, and the story more or less asks us to just accept it on faith. Similarly, even though In Essentials is fairly long, it focuses on a few major plot points and simply ignores large chunks of the story, trusting that we will fill in the blanks with nary a transition. It seems like the author had a list of scenes, wrote the AU version of each and checked it off, then strung them all together.

That’s not as much of a criticism as it sounds like; it works, in a way. The audience, by and large, is not going to need reasons to accept Elizabeth falling in love with Darcy in this scenario. Likewise, the audience knows the story and can fill in the spaces where nothing has changed. It’s even a bit of a relief not to rehash largely irrelevant scenes for the umpteenth time–but the pacing ends up feeling both uneven and forced. So it’s more of a mixed bag than anything else.

The consciousness of the audience goes well beyond that, though. In Essentials isn’t just written and structured with an obvious awareness of what the fandom accepts and expects. By the time the Hunsford scene rolls around, it’s very difficult to escape the impression that this story is responding to fandom much more than the canon. It is not the straight what-if it seems to be.

The thing is, there’s a really popular premise for P&P AUs, that goes something like: Elizabeth’s misunderstandings are cleared up earlier, so she and Darcy get together right away. There’s also the variation where Darcy and Elizabeth are thrown together relatively soon after Hunsford, with the same result (no misunderstandings = insta-romance). If you stop to think about it, there’s a fairly uncomfortable implication that it’s all on her. If only she hadn’t been blind and unfair and proud, she could have found love and happiness right away! In the book, of course, the fault and merit alike is carefully balanced between both of them.

And that plot device is, I think, what this fic is actually about. The real “what-if” here has little to do with Pemberley and everything to do with the fandom wholly blaming Elizabeth; that early trip to Pemberley/subsequent positive bias aren’t the point, they’re just the justification for a scenario where the story can say, okay, if we take away Elizabeth’s arrogance, we’re not left with sunshine and roses, we’re just left with Darcy’s arrogance.

Therefore, Darcy assumes that Elizabeth was unfairly prejudiced against him because of Wickham’s stories, but in fact, she didn’t believed Wickham and would have gladly accepted his proposal if he weren’t a jerk. He doesn’t heroically rescue Lydia. Elizabeth rescues Georgiana. And so on. It’s an odd role-reversal, where the reversals are clearly the point, but they’re made to arise naturally out of the plot rather than being the plot.

So. The plot itself is fairly well-constructed. I really admire the way In Essentials explores and up-ends a widespread fanon trope that I honestly hadn’t thought that deeply about. The characterization isn’t brilliant, but it’s not objectionable, either. On the technical level, the writing’s solid–some awkward phrasing, but nothing worse. This is normally the point where I’d wrap up.

However. (You probably saw that coming!)

However, I appreciate this story more than I enjoy it. My problem is that In Essentials’ Elizabeth is pretty much perfect. Her worst faults are being too nice and helping people too much, and the narrative’s attempt to convince us that these are actual faults on a par with Darcy’s is just … no. It doesn’t work. By the time she rescues Georgiana, I just wanted her to throw a piece of china at someone’s head. Darcy, meanwhile, has to grovel, because pretty much everything is his fault. I said before that P&P is careful to balance Darcy’s flaws and merits with Elizabeth’s. Here, there’s no balance. That is likely the point, but at some level, it doesn’t work for me; like the fic it’s responding to, it feels uncomfortably lopsided.

In conclusion: strong ideas, adequate execution, and irritating structure. I’ll average that out to three quills.