Love and Marriage by solvent90 (PG)

[hlbr.livejournal.com]

Fandom: JANE AUSTEN (MANSFIELD PARK)
Pairing: Fanny Price/Henry Crawford with a side of Mary Crawford/Edmund Bertram
Length: 3200 words
Author on LJ: solvent90
Author Website: solvent90's other stories at yuletide, and solvent90's fic tag.
Why this must be read:

This is an excellent, well written story, where the silences are almost as important as the things said. A powerful look at what may have been, it's not a happy story, but a necessary one. It's honest to a fault, and gives a new perspective on the canon characters. Definitively a different look at the Fanny accepts Henry scenario. It has a very good narrative voice, which makes for a quick, pleasant read.

Excerpt:

"I am afraid your cousin's is not quite a marriage of true minds, my dear," he said.

Love and Marriage

Comments

[maidenjedi]

I have to tell you thank you for the Fanny/Henry recs. It's the "pairing that got away" for me in JA! :-)

Yay!

[elizabeth-hoot.livejournal.com]

What a brilliant take on this most popular of alternate pairings - I love it! While the author does, so to speak, take up the offer Austen makes in MP, she doesn't try and make it bunny rabbits and rainbows, either, as so many do. She doesn't blacken anybody, and she doesn't whitewash them either. There's no sense that this is about any of the parties being unworthy of the other, that they're all unhappy because Henry and Mary are selfish sophisticates or, alternatively, Fanny and Edmund are dull and censorious - rather, she shows how they're genuinely ill-suited.

Fashionable London life is oppressive and destructive for Fanny - but it's hard not to feel that provincial seclusion is just as oppressive, just as destructive, for Mary. Fanny's pale, faded existence is heartbreaking - yet no more than this:

Henry caught Mary's dark eyes darted at him just then, and could not help the twist of his smile; she lifted her brows in response and, in that moment, was his sister again.

But then, I've always thought the Henry-Mary dynamic the most compelling relationship in MP.

Here, it's quiet, desperate, everyday tragedy - not what you'd find in Austen, but what I think she foresaw for them in MP, and perhaps why she didn't go there.