{"id":146,"date":"2011-10-04T20:11:11","date_gmt":"2011-10-04T20:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/?p=146"},"modified":"2012-05-27T00:34:45","modified_gmt":"2012-05-27T00:34:45","slug":"marriage-vows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/?p=146","title":{"rendered":"Marriage Vows"},"content":{"rendered":"

I must freely admit to being an enthusiast of anything that has to do with secondary or unpopular characters. The less play a character usually gets in fic, the more excited I will be when I come across a story featuring them. Even so, when I stumbled onto Silvestria’s Marriage Vows, I was a bit skeptical. I’ve never thought of Julia Bertram as having fic potential, but that, apparently, is because I lack vision.<\/p>\n

Why you should read this:<\/strong> You’re sad about the dearth of Mansfield Park fanfic. You like secondary characters. You like when antagonist characters are semi-redeemed yet kept in character. You like good writing. You’re a hardcore Julia\/Yates shipper.<\/p>\n

Reasons you might not like it:<\/strong> You like to keep your antagonist’s one-dimensional. You dislike Mansfield Park.<\/p>\n

Mansfield Park, Regency, canon, PG, at AO3<\/a><\/strong>
\n
\nWhile I’ve grown to appreciate stories that take plot departures and even ones that pick the characters up and drop them into entirely new settings (though not, I must say, stories that take liberties with essential characterization), I have a special affinity for fic that fits neatly and seamlessly into the margins of canon.<\/p>\n

Marriage Vows takes us to London to show us the events that lead up to Julia’s elopement with Mr. Yates. Yates, something of a cypher in the book, gets actual characterization, which is neat.<\/p>\n

In this convivial household, Mr. Yates was almost a daily visitor and was less of a nuisance when diluted by people who actually liked him. Moreover, his persistence was beginning to pay off in a small way. Julia could not help noticing that the majority of her admirers had followed her sister to Twickenham or at least appeared to have abandoned her, and she was forced to draw the conclusion that they had been more interested in her as a conduit to Mrs. Rushworth than for her own merits. It was a provoking and distressing thought. At least Mr. Yates was single-minded in his attentions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The emphasis is on Julia, however. The story isn’t a romance. At the end of it I felt hopeful that Yates and Julia might have a decent chance of marital happiness, but there’s more pragmatism than affection in Julia’s choice.<\/p>\n

What I really liked was the way you could understand Julia by the end of it. Not that it’s hard to understand in the book, but in Marriage Vows, it’s really driven home why Julia would rather risk elopement with a man she hardly knows than return home to a strict father in the wake of her sister’s disgrace.<\/p>\n

Mr. Yates’ silence confirmed her fears. Was Edmund then to be right about society as a two-faced, unsympathetic monster? Would the people whom she had considered her friends desert her now, and the men she had laughed over accepting with Miss Crawford or Sophie in a hypothetical future abandon her? Though still innocent of any wrongdoing, she would return in disgrace to Mansfield Park. She felt a new surge of resentment towards her sister. She had committed no folly yet would doubtless be the one to endure whatever restrictions her father saw fit to impose and be forced to listen to more lectures meant rather for the absent Maria’s ears.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A short (at just over 10,000 words it’s positively svelte for Austen fandom) and well-written little fic, Marriage Vows is definitely worth a read by anyone who enjoyed Mansfield Park.<\/p>\n

\"5<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I must freely admit to being an enthusiast of anything that has to do with secondary or unpopular characters. The less play a character usually gets in fic, the more excited I will be when I come across a story featuring them. Even so, when I stumbled onto Silvestria’s Marriage Vows, I was a bit…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[94,14,38,50,48,95,33,92],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lady-christian-henrietta-caroline-acland","tag-author-silvestria","tag-era-regency","tag-length-short-story","tag-quills-five","tag-rating-general","tag-source-mansfield-park","tag-type-canon","tag-type-interstitial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andbirds.org\/sc\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}