this is just a dumping ground for my regency ideas and for you i select my favorite (have not written a word of it in years but it made me laugh just now rereading)
“I think we ought to hasten the wedding.”
Lady Euphemia arched one fine brow. “Do you?”
Steeling himself, James nodded. “October is a ways off. Why should we wait when we are not likely to change our minds?”
With deceptive mildness, his mother said, “The purpose of an engagement is not to allow you to change your mind, James. Your mind must be already made up at the time of the proposal.”
“I am not changing anything,” he said. “And neither is she! But what I mean to say is—”
“The heat of a summer wedding would be ill-advised,” his mother murmured. This was an argument thoroughly covered by Lady Euphemia and Mrs. Evans jointly, when the date had been decided. “Your many elderly relatives, to say nothing of your ageing parents—”
James scoffed. “You can’t pretend you and Great-Aunt Mabel are of similar health.”
“Well, as you are bent on ignoring Great-Aunt Mabel’s wishes, I must bring mine into the conversation!” His mother shook her head, her lips pursed. “Your godmother, James, only wants to witness your wedding — I do believe it’s the only event keeping her with us.”
Momentarily forgetting which side he was on, he said, “Mother!”
Lady Euphemia did not break stride at all. “It is not right to leave the relatives who have cherished you and spoiled you rotten to the wayside—”
“What wayside? Mabel’s in Greece!”
“—when you bring your wife into this family. No, James, your father and I are very firm on this matter. We will do things properly. Why, he and I were engaged ten months. Six is next to nothing—”
“But I love her!” James protested before he could restrain himself. (So much, he thought, for grand, refined Oxonian rhetoric.)
Hi Suze! So I was rereading your regency avatar au again because it’s so great. And I was wondering what bender would Harry have been in this Au? Sorry if you’ve already been asked this before
hi and thank you, thats so sweet of you! i can't remember if someone has asked that before. part of me is like well. he's the avatar naturally. but even if he IS the avatar, what element would he start with?
i think i like the idea of him being a firebender first, obviously cut from a very different mould from james or sirius, similar to how korra in her series comes across as very different from the waterbenders we'd come to expect as the norm in ATLA. if i can say something painful....in a future for this AU where his parents die and harry is sent to live with the dursleys like in canon, i can imagine them overreacting to his firebending similar to the way they do with his magic — it's certainly the most un-ignorable element — and linking it to his bad-influence father; the same can be said of others in canon who don't care for james, like snape. (it's interesting too to have subdivided inherited magic applied to hp canon... like instead of harry's magical inheritance being from both his parents, he has specific magical inheritances from each and they're kind of obvious legacies. how would it affect harry to learn about his dad's less than stellar teenage antics? how would it affect his firebending, especially if that's the kind of bending he had first and is constantly brought up as a similarity between harry and james? kind of like with aang's struggles to learn firebending after he burns katara in s1, or korra's struggles to learn airbending) i also like the idea that it would be an early, obvious if perhaps superficial similarity to james much in the way harry's physical appearance is. but being able to bend all four elements, he of course always has lily's powers with him. like, the hurt/comfort reunions with sirius and remus later on in life (poa-gof-ootp style) write themselves.
tattoo shop but make it regency 🪡 8k words; rated M
All the other customary marks on James’s body have been made either aboard his ship, his fear abated by cheap spirits, or in foreign ports. But this, they all said, this, his promotion to captain, this deserves ink from the Portsmouth tattooist’s hand.
HOLY THE AIR, THE WATER, AND THE FIRE; for @sunshinemarauder
avatar but make it regency 🌙 8.5k words
“As it is I’m told two dances would be quite forward. If we dance two in a row we risk being carted off straight away to a chapel.”
He's a Firebender. That's the only reason his hands are so warm.
pwp anon here and im always down to hear your thoughts about arranged marriages in the the regency time period
sure, i pontificated abt this in the DMs of no less than two people so we may as well air it out for everyone's reading pleasure/displeasure, no?
i am by no means a historian, i am simply a reader of things, and regrettably many of the things centre around english/british history. i also recently read a truly fascinating account of marriage through the ages recommended by bestie @clare-with-no-i, called marriage, a history by stephanie coontz, and i will hopefully not absolutely fuck up what i have just learned from there.
but the concept of arranged marriage with jily specifically seems to me like a misunderstanding both of what an arranged marriage means (x1000 for the regency) AND of jily's dynamic — which i've come to realise i have quite strong and dare i say particular, sticklery, text-faithful views about which i know not everyone really cares about.
so with that out of the way,
i've said this a lot of times ik. but part of the thing with AUs for me is that i feel like i have to keep some elements of jily's canonical backgrounds/dynamic. otherwise i'm not really adapting these characters to another setting, am i? and to me one of the fairly significant things is james's privilege.
in AUs i want him to either be directly confronting it (if it's that kind of story) or suggest that he has already begun to confront it, or will have to confront it eventually. this is of course not because i, like, get off on putting them on an unequal social footing — on the contrary, one of my favourite things as a jily shipper is exploring how both characters grow out of immaturity, learn not to misunderstand each other, and come to love each other.
truthfully i don't like not making james rich to preemptively smooth over any discomfort in their relationship. for one it feels tied to his ignorance and his generosity, his confidence and his insensitivity; for another discomfort is part of life and part of love. feels disingenuous to write that out tbh
you could argue that this stuff really shouldn't matter for fluff that's meant to be escapist and easy reading, to which i say yeah, fair enough, to each their own. it's not like i close out of any modern uni au fic i come across where james isn't immediately established as baby warbucks, shouting "this isn't canon-aligned!"
BUT! when we're talking period marriage, or especially "arranged" marriage, it's pretty clear that discomfort is part of the premise. like, the point is watching them get comfortable with each other over time, and it feels a bit like cheating to me to minimise the uphill battle to begin with. pretty sure everyone here is here for the lizzie-darcy, not the lily-of-means à la emma woodhouse who could really have her pick of gentlemen!
now, on to "arranged" marriage. i put this in scare quotes because really, it seems like a weird qualifier to make for certain periods of history and certain social situations, and i sometimes wonder if people know what they mean when they say arranged!
like, i'm indian. an arranged marriage doesn't mean you're trussed up in a wedding outfit and shown to your future spouse on the day of the event (...though it can, unfortunately) — that is not the chief characteristic here. what it means is your families know one another, the match is advantageous for whatever reason (you share a community, a religious subdivision, said families really get along, they think you two are suited) so the families are like "let's make this happen." love is not necessarily a factor, but then for the vast majority of human history, to our knowledge, it really hasn't been, for most marriages across rungs of society. like, my guy the farmer's son might have been fond of his neighbour's daughter, but he's still thinking about how she'll help on the farm, if she can support his trade, what she brings to this economic partnership.
because that's what it was. an economic partnership.
our notion of arranged marriage is a closer analogue for royal marriages, i think pretty much across cultures and time periods. so you are a prince and you're set up with this princess because you need her uncle's support, or her father's money, or some such.
e.g. you are henry fitzempress and you want to keep england and normandy and anjou, and to do so you have to watch out for louis, king of france. so you very smoothly marry his ex-wife, eleanor of aquitaine, because aquitaine is an immensely powerful territory and eleanor brings you that in her dowry as well as every other sort of support you might need against louis — men, arms, money, the works. done deal!
or, let's look for an example with less ~choice~: you are the future henry viii (shocking beginning given "less choice", i know) and your brother's just died, but your lowkey cheapskate dad henry vii is not keen on giving back catherine of aragon's dowry, and like, he's taken all this trouble to bring her here and make an alliance with her parents, what the fuck's the point if she's now free to go marry someone else???? and possibly build a different alliance that weakens england??? no! henry my son you will marry her now.
but notice that both people are bringing immense value to matches like this. it's the perks, not the person. it is ruinously stupid to try and arrange a match with someone (a woman, really, this goes one way) who doesn't bring you a valuable dowry, whether that's actual income, income via land (see aquitaine), or at the very least nice noble connections (see gregory cromwell, son of thomas cromwell of advisor to henry viii fame, marrying bess seymour, the sister of then-queen jane seymour. for the cromwells, a family of commoners, to connect themselves with the old aristocratic seymours and become the king's in-laws was a nice little arrangement, and of course it's good for the seymours to solidify an alliance with the up-and-up cromwells too).
a dowry, for those unfamiliar, is an inheritance kept aside for a woman that becomes an attractive incentive for her future husband, as he will eventually get that inheritance when he marries her. a dowry is not a bride price — it goes from the woman (from her father or another male relative, usually), to her husband upon marriage.
talk of dowries is all over pride and prejudice. the Big One is georgiana's dowry, which wickham has his eye on when he tries to seduce her. but note that even mrs bennet, who if i'm not wrong is the daughter of a tradesman (i.e. not gentry/nobility), has a dowry of her own settled upon her by her father at the time of her marriage, which can only be inherited by her daughters after her death. if i recall right lydia's (nonexistent) dowry is handled by darcy. this is bog-standard stuff — leaving aside implied misogyny women-are-a-burden things, the idea is that a bachelor's household is of course going to grow when he gains a wife and a family, so he's gonna need some means to settle down
or let me pick a whole 'nother example — in downton abbey, mary, the eldest daughter, basically knows she's going to marry the man who inherits her father's estate, because it's a nice way to keep it in the family (rather like the bennets wanting one of their daughters to marry mr collins). they have, in a word, an "understanding." i don't think i need to explain here, though, why mary, an heiress in her own right even if she can't inherit her father's actual property, is hardly a cinderella in need of a prince
and i think you can already see where i'm going with this + the jily socioeconomic dynamic — i just don't see a world in which james's (presumably better off) parents are like, yeah, this is the girl for you, we've set it all up, not to worry, enjoy the wedding night. put crudely, what the hell kind of leverage does lily's family have over them?
like okay, i am hard-pressed to call this "arranged" because he asked her, and she consented (given ofc the caveat that she didn't have a great deal of choice), but mr collins and charlotte is a decent example where he's kind of (cringes) "doing her a favour" by marrying her, because she's really not very eligible — her parents are gentry but not well-off, and she's a spinster. but he needs a wife and doesn't really mind those things because he has a decent income and doesn't need (and, really, couldn't get) an heiress. and even then is it really arranged? it's arranged by mr collins, which to me is just "man decides who he'll marry"
so it seems to me that when people say "arranged marriage" what they really mean is reluctant/forced, which, again, i'm not sure i see that happening between people of different stations (one condition applies and i'll get to that) unless james is royalty, and even then lily had better be something, or james is about to piss off eeeeeeveryone at his court.
to be regency-specific, i think too people underestimate the amount of free choice the average gentleman would have had in making his own marriage. no matter how overbearing his parents, he could probably get away even with not honouring an "informal agreement" arranged by them when he and his intended were younger. and that's not even touching upon the fact that this is james specifically, and these are his parents specifically. fleamont and euphemia are canonically indulgent, and i can't fathom a world in which they insist on marrying james off against his will, to a girl equally reluctant.
(and this may be controversial, but nor can i see james consenting to such a match, even if he already has feelings for lily. it icks me out to think of him roping her into marrying him for like a billion reasons, but especially because this is something jily antis say all the time about canon, that he somehow compelled her to marry him. given a time period where a man of means probably could get away with that, it strikes me as skeezy to have the romantic lead — and, again, james specifically!!! — do it. imagine, basically, james as the mr collins to her lizzie — not exactly arranged either, but her mother sees the benefit of the match and encourages it, and it's a hard thing to say no to. it is shocking enough that lizzie says no to mr collins, and he even points out that she probably won't receive another offer. i find this not very romantic idk about you lol)
finally, courtship in the regency was a ritual. your parents don't just sit down with her parents and decide for you (and again, certainly not indulgent parents like james's). you'd still want to dance with her, formally express interest in her, ask her guardian's permission, and ask for her hand — and hopefully you're doing something in all that time that constitutes getting to know her, or at least seeing if you'd like to be married to each other. if you rushed into a marriage (i'm trying to spitball scenarios in which jily wouldn't know each other and therefore wouldn't be in love yet at the time of their marriage), people would talk — and the #1 thing they'd say is probably that she accidentally got pregnant somewhere along the way so the families are trying to save face rq.
in fact this is the one exception i could see with this whole arranged marriage shtick. if they were somehow caught in a compromising position, they would have to go on and get married asap, and you could argue that this might turn out to be reluctant depending on the circumstances. for instance in the bed-sharing fic i just wrote, two's a crowd, they are certainly not courting or in love, and lily's well aware that if word of this behaviour gets out it won't look good for her — and james knows too what he'd be honour-bound to do.
but honestly i find this to be such a depressing premise! it's sad and awful and reminds me uncomfortably of lydia bennet, who's really stuck in a shit situation to any modern reader imo. even lydia fancies herself in love with wickham before they elope, and needless to say he's probably not exactly in it because he has tender, poetic feelings for her.
that's not to say that love couldn't come out of something like this, but it's not a premise i feel like tackling in the regency era specifically, when you can get the yearning and the drama and all that without curtailing choice in such a specific, embarrassing way. (like, to have to write that social shame... eurgh. my own stomach would turn going on about women ruined and whatnot. there is a julia quinn book that features this and i won't say which one, but frankly i found the way it was executed downright ridiculous and very much un-james anyway)
i just think that a premise more realistic to the characters would be where they like what little they know of each other and then learn to love each other once they're married — less dramatic, i know, but also less contrived. sometimes romance is in the smaller things.
as an aside, my royal au, which is set several centuries before the regency, is probably the only fic i'll write with an arranged marriage, though it's more of a marriage of convenience — which is really a more apt, specific descriptor, i think, for those kinds of marriages. like, both parties are getting something out of this, and neither is under illusions as to whether or not they are in love. they wouldn't really expect to be.
