Frederic & Elfrida: “Still a Better Love Story than Twilight”

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Content Warning: Discussion of suicide from 28:53 to 33:27.

We’re entering unexplored territory for both hosts as Lauren and Emily launch into Jane Austen’s Juvenilia with “Frederic and Elfrida,” written in 1787. There’s petty drama! There’s attempted murder! There’s a surprising amount of parallel to 2000s satire!

We are still wrestling with some technical issues during the transition to remote recording — please bear with us as we work to achieve the best audio quality with the available resources.

Transcript

Emily: This is Reclaiming Jane, an Austen podcast for fans on the margins.

Lauren: I'm Lauren Wethers.

Emily: And I'm Emily Davis Hale.

Lauren: And today, we're reading "Frederic and Elfrida."

[intro music]

Emily: Welcome back to Reclaiming Jane!

Lauren: We missed you!

Emily: We missed you guys so much. We're so happy to be back. But also, personally, I would like to thank everyone for their patience. It has been so helpful in the last few months to have the free headspace to get things done. [laughs] I had a lot happening.

Lauren: Just casually finished a PhD, became a doctor. You may now address them as Dr. Emily Davis-Hale, for the record.

Emily: Thank you. I do have to pass off the hype to everyone else because I refuse to do it myself.

Lauren: Which I knew, which is why I was going to say it, that we now have a co-host who is a doctor. And so we thank you very much for the the grace and the time as Emily finished their PhD program. And then as also we just took a little bit of a break.

Emily: Yeah, we needed it to sort of, you know, recover our our motivation and our enthusiasm because we went for three and a half years solid without more than like a month break. So being able to regroup and figure out what we were going to do for this next phase of the podcast was definitely a boon.

Lauren: It was, really, and I'm also just really excited that now we get to come back. I was so excited that I got to sit down and read something new again. I put podcast recording on my schedule and it's nice — it's nice to get back into the groove of things. I didn't realize how much I'd missed it until I was back in the swing of it.

Emily: Yeah, I'm sure that I will miss it less once I'm sitting down to edit episodes again.

Lauren: Potentially. Yeah.

Emily: But hey, I did that to myself.

Lauren: It's all gonna be fine. We will survive.

Emily: So yeah, we have a little bit of housekeeping to do up front because some things are changing slightly for the new and improved Reclaiming Jane.

Lauren: So as you may have noticed, we are doing her Juvenilia, but also those are much shorter works. And so we're not going to be limiting ourselves to just one theme to discuss within the different things that we're reading of her early works. So you may have heard in the intro, we did not say that we were reading "Frederic and Elfrida" through a theme of blank because we have decided to keep the themes in the first edition of Reclaiming Jane.

Emily: We also decided to cut down our recaps. We know the competition of it was part of the comedy, but again, because they're so short and we're not trying to connect separate parts of a story throughout multiple episodes, we're just going to have one person go each time.

Lauren: And that will still be able to get us like a little bit of the recap energy, but without both of us saying the exact same thing and kind of just using up some dead air.

Emily: It'll still only be 30 seconds. The mania will still exist, I guarantee.

Lauren: Oh, trust. Let's see, any other housekeeping things?

Emily: Yes! We wanted to let everybody know which edition of the Juvenilia we are reading. We both - we decided to work from the same copy, the same edition, this time, just for consistency's sake. We are using Jane Austen's Manuscript Works, which is edited by Linda Brie, Peter Sabor, and Janet Todd.

Lauren: Thank you so much, if anybody from that project happens to be listening to this podcast, we very much appreciate the scholarship and I always appreciate all of the footnotes.

Emily: Absolutely. This is the most thoroughly footnoted version of any Austen I've used, and I'm really enjoying it.

Lauren: Same! We also, because we are not recording in the same place anymore, we necessarily had to change the way that we record, which means that we are recording over a video platform that allows us to record video. So if you would like to see Reclaiming Jane somewhat in 2D and you would like to see a video podcast, if you subscribe to our Patreon, the video recordings of each podcast episode will be available over there, along with all the rest of the content that we have specifically for our Patrons. So definitely check that out if you're interested and you can actually see what we look like.

Emily: yeah Patrons at all levels get access to a Discord server where we talk about Jane Austen. Everyone also gets early access to episode releases and $5 and up will get our beautiful faces on their screens as well as my sad little blanket booth.

Lauren: And you can see how terrible my audio recording setup is.

[both laugh]

Emily: We're doing our best. Well, I believe that concludes our housekeeping notes, so should we jump into "Frederic and Elfrida," the first of our Juvenilia readings?

Lauren: We should, but first we have to pick which one of us is going to be the recapper this episode. I'm going to do a number generator and I'm going to pick a number and like we should both pick a number between one and 10. And then I'll use a random number generator and whoever is closest gets to not recap. [laughs]

Emily: Okay. [laughs] That's fair enough. Great.

Lauren: Okay.

Emily: I have my number.

Lauren: Okay. Say your number out loud so that we know.

Emily: Oh, seven.

Lauren: Okay, mine was five. Drum roll, please... It was five!

Emily: Oh no!

Lauren: I have taken a photo to prove to Emily it was actually five. I'm not lying.

Emily: I believe you, but I do appreciate the proof.

Lauren: Thank you. You know, I am nothing if not a woman of my word.

Lauren: Okay. I am putting 30 seconds on the clock. Oh my God, I haven't done this in so long! This is so fun! Okay.

Emily: Oh, God. Also, I would like to say at a certain point during our initial run, I started taking notes of events. I did not do that this time, so I am rawdogging this recap.

Lauren: Let's get it! Okay, Emily, are you ready to recap "Frederic and Elfrida," which is about nine pages, in 30 seconds?

Emily: [hesitantly] Yes.

Lauren: Okay, excellent. Three, two, one, go.

Emily: Okay, Frederic and Elfrida are first cousins who are in love with each other, but they can't say that. They have a number of friends. They meet some new young ladies to the neighborhood, one of whom is very beautiful and one of whom is very ugly. Their friend Charlotte goes off to London and gets engaged to two men and then kills herself. And then Frederic and Alfredo's parents unite them to each other, but they don't get married for 18 years.

Lauren: Good enough, you had one second left.

Emily: Also, I realized we should probably be timing ourselves because of the Zencastr lag.

Lauren: Probably, there's also a little counter at the top of Zencastr, so we could use that too. A counter - timer.

Emily: Yeah, I half noticed that as I was beginning, but could not have kept up with the seconds for the life of me.

Lauren: Fair enough.

Emily: All right. Anyway, that was my recap of "Frederic and Elfrida"!

Lauren: Well done, thank you for kicking us off.

Emily: Thank you. Thank you.

Lauren: Okay. Where should we begin?

Emily: Ah, I would like to begin not in the story itself, but give a little introduction to what we're looking at.

Lauren: Love it.

Emily: I did make some notes on this.

Lauren: Excellent.

Emily: Yeah, so just a moment spent on the Juvenilia at large and then a little about "Frederic and Elfrida" itself, mostly timing-wise in Jane Austen's life. The collected Juvenilia are stories that were written in the late 1780s and early 1790s, which are Austen's teen years. These predate any work that we know of on her published novels. "Frederic and Elfrida" itself is from 1787, so she was probably 11 years old when she wrote this story, which is absolutely wild.

Lauren: I could not believe that. I went and did the math after I finished reading because I was like, oh, let me go and look to see how old she would have been. And I cannot fathom being that smart at 11. At 11 years old, I think I was still - I had hadn't even started writing my terrible fanfiction yet at 11. Like it was purely silly chapter books I wrote for like, young authors competitions. This is ridiculous.

Emily: Yeah, by 11, I think I had written an Arthur story for like a school competition. And then, you know, like the first chapter of a bunch of different fantasy books.

Lauren: Yep, sounds about right.

Emily: But okay, yeah, so that's our context, that Jane Austen was 11 when she wrote "Frederic and Elfrida." So just keep that in mind as we go through this story.

Lauren: And I think another great note that was from the footnotes of this edition is that in "Frederic and Elfrida," she's mocking a lot of novel conventions, satirizing the books that she was starting to read and love and gain an understanding, which makes so much sense. It's really cool to see her sarcasm and her humor begin to develop from like very young, like preteen Jane Austen to the adult Jane Austen whose books are the ones that we're all very familiar with. It's neat to be able to see that even at 11, she already was beginning to poke fun at the novel and at conventions of the time in a way that makes sense for an 11 year old.

Emily: You can definitely see the beginnings of that very sharp wit that she hones later in her maturity.

Lauren: 100%. And some of it is also like 11 year old humor as well, which I found really endearing.

Emily: Definitely. Yeah, I really loved what the introductory commentary of this edition said. They refer to many of these stories as being "burlesques" of the genres that she's referring to, and that was just so beautifully accurate.

Lauren: I love it so much.

Emily: So, "Frederic and Elfrida"?

Lauren: Frederic and Elfrida, the doomed cousins. [laughs]

Emily: Hey, they end up happy in the end.

Lauren: Do they? They end up married. I don't know if they end up happy.

Emily: Okay, for our purposes, we have to assume that they're equivalent, I guess.

Lauren: Okay. Yeah, we start off with Frederic and Elfrida, who are cousins, who have some form of attachment to one another, but they'll never say that out loud, and they are so alike that no one can tell them apart except for the difference in complexion, the fact that their faces are shaped differently... pretty much everything about them is different, but they're completely indistinguishable from one another.

Emily: And inseparable, evidently, because they share the same friends, they spend nine hours in some country grove...

Lauren: And they also apparently are in the same class, which is ridiculous because there was no mixed gender schooling at that time. They 100% would have been separated.

Emily: But one of their shared friends is Charlotte, who periodically goes to visit her aunt in London.

Lauren: And while Charlotte is in London, Elfrida writes to her and says, "I should be obliged to you if you would buy me during your stay with Mrs. Williamson, a new and fashionable bonnet to suit the complexion of your Elfrida Falknor." And because Charlotte - this is very important - is eager to please, she of course returns and has purchased the bonnet for her friend.

Emily: "And so ended this little adventure, much to the satisfaction of all parties."

Lauren: Drama! the intrigue! the stakes!

Emily: Yes. It's just such an 11-year-old's approach to telling a story. Like, oh, there's just all these little episodes and that's what makes a story. There's lots of scenes.

Lauren: Yeah, that's 100% how I read stories when I was 11. It was like, chapter one, I went to school. Chapter two, I came home.

Emily: It's so charming to see Jane Austen doing the same thing.

Once Charlotte has returned from her sojourn in London, the three dear friends go and wander through this beautiful little grove, and there they encounter two elegant young women, one of whom is warbling this song. I really wish that we had the music for this song, but the delightful little lines are, "that Damon was in love with me / I once thought and believed / but now that he is not, I see / I fear I was deceived." But upon the two women beholding these three young friends, they disappear down a different path.

But in Chapter the Second, Frederic and Elfrida and Charlotte surmise that these two young men women must belong to the family that has just moved into the neighborhood.

Lauren: And so, of course, they go to call upon this new family and meet these two young women who may or may not actually be that young, which we'll find out after the fact, but they immediately just start dragging the younger sister, Rebecca, through the mud. Just dragged by her edges for no reason. I felt so bad. [laughs]

Emily: Do you want to read this or should I?

Lauren: I would love to.

Emily: Okay, please, please grace us with this description of Rebecca as told by Frederic, Elfrida, and Charlotte.

Lauren: "So, ere they had been many minutes seated," just to set the scene, "the wit and charms which shone resplendent in the conversation of the amiable Rebecca enchanted them so much that they all with one accord jumped up and exclaimed, 'Lovely and too charming fair one, notwithstanding your forbidding squint, your greasy tresses, and your swelling back, which are more frightful than imagination can paint or pen describe, I cannot refrain from expressing my raptures at the engaging qualities of your mind, which so amply atone for the horror which your first appearance must ever inspire the unwary visitor.'" Not - they called her a greasy haired hunchback. What?

Emily: Literally.

[both laughing]

Lauren: Which is also such an 11-year-old insult. That's such a playground thing. Like, I can I can picture, like, 11-year-old Jane Austen in, like, a modern-day playground, like, yelling at some girl for taking her turn on the swings and saying, you're a greasy-haired hunchback, and having the other girl running go tell the teacher. Like, what? The audacity.

Emily: But apparently, Rebecca, nor her family, is much offended by this because they all continue to be excellent friends.

Lauren: Oh yeah, such excellent friends that in case anybody has to be thrown out of the window, you know, it's no big deal. They really love each other a lot.

Emily: Yeah - there has to be some kind of social context to that that I just don't understand.

Lauren: I think she's just being sarcastic. The sentence is that, :From this period, the intimacy between the families of Fitzroy, Drummond, and Falknor daily increase to such a pitch that they did not scruple to kick one another out of the window on the slightest provocation." Like I love you so much. And also I will throw you out of this window. I hate you. Get out.

Emily: Yeah, okay, maybe that hasn't changed so much.

Lauren: No.

Emily: "However, during this happy state of harmony, the eldest Miss Fitzroy" - whose name is Jezelinda, for the record - "ran off with the coachman and the amiable Rebecca was asked in marriage by Captain Roger of Buckinghamshire." Uh, which is when we find out Rebecca's age. She's the younger sister, remember?

Lauren: And she's 36.

Emily: She's 36, and her Captain Roger is "little more than 63," but [laughing] Rebecca's mother protests the tender age of these lovers and insists that they must wait longer to be married.

Lauren: And you'll see later just how much longer they wait to become betrothed. It's a truly long time. [laughs]

Emily: But we have to wait so long to find that out. Honestly, we probably wait as long to find that out in the reading as they do to get married.

Lauren: Probably, because while we wait to find out what's going to become of our of our two young lovers, in the meantime, we switch gears a little bit and we find out that the parents of Frederic proposed to those of Elfrida. So now the two cousins are actually engaged, but they're not going to get married yet.

Emily: We don't have any idea how old they actually are though.

Lauren: No, not yet. But now at least their engagement has been set, and then we switch to Charlotte.

Emily: Charlotte, who goes to visit her aunt again.

Lauren: Wonderful, people-pleasing Charlotte, who also just needs to get one more dig in at Rebecca before she leaves.

Emily: Oh yes - Charlotte goes to take her leave of Rebecca and finds Rebecca doing her makeup, essentially, and says, "I am come, my amiable Rebecca, to take my leave of you for the fortnight I am destined to spend with my aunt. Believe me, this separation is painful to me, but it is as necessary as the labor which now engages you."

Lauren: Ouch.

Emily: They cannot leave this girl alone.

Lauren: Like, you know that you're not that pretty. No, just had to get in a dig about like, yeah, making yourself beautiful is so much work. My goodness.

Emily: So much work, but SO necessary.

Lauren: I cannot. Charlotte gives her one last actual compliment or so we're led to believe because it's not actually put into the text and off she goes and into London to a very fashionable part of the city where of course immediately upon arrival she is the recipient of two proposals.

Emily: She is accosted by proposals.

Lauren: Because that's what happens when you go to town, like you you show up on the scene and everyone is immediately in love with you, and men throw themselves at your feet, um partly by intention and partly through weakness, if you are the first man who proposes to her, which leads me to believe that he literally tripped over his own feet and fell at her feet to propose.

Emily: And of course, Charlotte being so agreeable and such a people pleaser has to agree. Not being able to resolve to make any anyone miserable.

Lauren: And then somebody else comes through the door and there's a handsome and young gentleman who comes in who also proposes marriage and she can't disappoint him either. So she says yes, again.

Emily: And then - actually, you know what? I was going to say this is the wildest part of this story. It's not even the wildest part of the story, but among the wilder parts of the story. "It was not till the next morning that Charlotte recollected the double engagement she had entered into, but when she did, the reflection of her past folly operated so strongly on her mind that she resolved to be guilty of a greater, and to that end threw herself into a deep stream which ran through her aunt's pleasure grounds in Portland Place." Whereupon she floats back to the village where everyone lives and they bury her and write her a little rhyming epitaph.

Lauren: "Here lies our friend who having promis-ed / that unto too she would be marri-ed / threw her sweet body and her lovely face into the stream that runs through Portland Place."

Emily: And then we get two brief paragraphs reflecting on, you know, the offices that her dear friends have done for their departed Charlotte. And then we move on.

Lauren: Just a casual, drowning death in the stream because she realizes that she said yes to two men. It's just another day in the neighborhood! Write her a nice epitaph. Moving on.

Emily: Which is when Captain Roger and Rebecca decide that they have had enough of this waiting, which has lasted two and a half pages.

Lauren: And seven whole days.

Emily: Yes. But they go to Mrs. Fitzroy, Rebecca's mother, and threaten her, essentially. [laughing] Let us get married or we will kill you.

Lauren: [laughing] I can't, I'm sorry. um the The sentence they said was, "but if you refuse to join their hands in three days' time, this dagger which I enclose in my left shall be steeped in your heart's blood. Speak then, madam, and decide their fate and yours."

Emily: And then one of my favorite lines, one of the funniest is, "Such a gentle and sweet persuasion could not fail of having the desired effect."

Lauren: So of course she says yes. They're seven whole days older than they were when she first expressed reservations about the 36 year old and the 63 year old being a little bit too young for matrimony. But now seven days have passed and she's been threatened with a dagger to the heart. So now they're old enough and now it's fine.

Emily: But Captain Roger and Rebecca are indeed married and they go off to his seat in Buckinghamshire.

Lauren: Also, they go off to his seat in Buckinghamshire in a stage wagon, which is like the Regency equivalent of a Megabus. So just imagine [both laughing] There's no, like, nice little private horse-drawn carriage for the two of them, for the newlyweds. They're, like, packed on to a stage wagon, which has multiple other people on it, and goes at basically just a walking pace. So it's going to take them forever to get back to his country seat, and that imagery is so funny to me.

Emily: It's one of the least romantic options available, but that's what they've got.

Lauren: No romance for the old people. You get nothing.

Emily: And so with that, we're left with Frederic and Elfrida. But Elfrida is so delicate that no one wants to press her on the question of when she and Frederic might be married. And so 18 years pass.

Lauren: They're still not married, and Rebecca's had a whole child.

Emily: Rebecca and Roger come back to introduce Elfrida to their beautiful daughter of 18.

Lauren: And Elfrida is really excited about this, because her former acquaintance was growing too old and too ugly to be any longer agreeable, which is hilarious because, bestie, you also have aged at least 18 years. So I don't know what you thought this was, but you're you're no spring chicken either.

Emily: But she is not led to be happy by the acquaintance of the beautiful Eleanor because she perceives that Frederic has some attachment to this girl now, and she can't have that.

Lauren: And Eleanor also treats her as an old woman when Elfrida thought that she was going to find a friend in this 18-year-old who has just appeared. The daughter of her friend, mind you, she now wants to be her special friend. And when Eleanor says, um no, you're like my mom's friend and you're old, Elfrida has her feelings hurt.

Emily: But between this and the apparent infatuation of Frederic with Eleanor, Elfrida decides that they must immediately be married and informs Frederic of this, that she has an intention of being married the next day.

Lauren: And Frederic is not having it to the point where he says, "you may be married tomorrow, but I won't."

Emily: But recall, Elfrida is just so terribly delicate and "She accordingly fainted and was in such a hurry to have a succession of fainting fits that she had scarcely patience enough to recover from one before she fell into another."

Lauren: I'm just picturing her with one eye open, like looking at the reactions of the people around her, like, is it working?

Emily: Yes, exactly. [laughs] But Frederic is a softie and this changes his mind. And so "immediately on hearing of the dangerous way Elfrida was in, he flew to her and finding her better than he had been taught to expect, was united to her forever."

Lauren: The end.

Emily: The end. I could swear I told some version of this story when I was 11 too. The peaks of melodrama, the threats, the unexpected deaths, the marriages out of nowhere.

Lauren: Hurling yourself into the stream because two men love you and you don't know what to do.

Emily: Yes.

Lauren: Bella Swan could never.

Emily: Still a better love story than Twilight?

Lauren: Still a better love story than Twilight.

Emily: It was such a delightful little read and I definitely see these points of articulation with what Jane Austen becomes as a writer. I definitely see the parallels with the gothicism of Northanger Abbey, as well as that very sharp authorial commentary. You cannot escape Jane Austen's opinions on these actions or the genre that inspired them.

Lauren: Yeah, it's cool to see. I mean, sarcastic preteen Jane Austen just makes so much sense. And it's neat to be able to see all of her thoughts kind of on the page before she learned how to add a little bit more subtlety to her satire and her social commentary and things like that, where you can watch her learning how to write and how to include her social commentary and her characters and her settings and the voice that she uses as an author and it's really cool. 11 year old Jane Austen, well done.

Emily: Mm hmm. We salute you.

Lauren: We salute you and I really wonder if you had somebody who you didn't like in your childhood named Rebecca because everyone was dunking on that poor girl.

Emily: Poor Rebecca. Oh, my goodness.

Lauren: Oh my gosh.

Emily: Greasy haired, ugly.

Lauren: Greasy haired, hunchback Rebecca! I feel worse for her than I do for Charlotte. And Charlotte threw herself into the river and drowned.

Emily: Oh my god, the folly.

Lauren: One of the footnotes in our edition also mentioned that Charlotte throwing herself into the river is referencing Ophelia's death in Hamlet and kind of playing off of that a little bit, which in turn makes me think of the early 2010s video series "Sassy Gay Friend" from like 2011, 2012.

Emily: Yes.

Lauren: Charlotte also needed a sassy gay friend to say, what are you doing? What, what, what are you doing? Don't throw yourself in that river, girl.

Are there other elements? Because this is so short, it's easy for us to kind of interject our own observations as we recap, but were there other things about the story itself that you wanted to mention before we dive into historical connections in pop culture?

Emily: I think we've essentially got it, unless I just go ahead and start talking about history, but I want to give us this space before we jump into the next thing.

Lauren: I think really the only thing, the only other thing that I would mention is that the elder sister, the eldest Miss Fitzroy running off with the coachman, reminded me of Sybil running off with the chauffeur in Downton Abbey.

Emily: Absolutely. There was just no further commentary on that whatsoever. It's just, oh, yeah, she ran off with the coachman. But more importantly, the ugly one got married to an old man... by Jane Austen's standards.

Lauren: Okay, Emily, what do you have for our very first historical connection of Reclaiming Jane Redux?

Emily: Um... It's not a fun one, necessarily... [laughs]

Lauren: Uh oh.

Emily: I was just - I was so struck by the suddenness of Charlotte throwing herself into the stream and that clear parallel with Ophelia. And also just the nonchalance of the way Austen treats it in the narrative was very, very interesting to me. So... trigger warning, heads up. I'm going to be talking about historical philosophies of suicide. If this is not a topic that you would like to listen to or engage with, I will make sure to leave a safe timestamp in the notes. [TRANSCRIPT NOTE: SAFE CONTENT STARTS AGAIN AT ***] So head over there if you don't want this, but let's talk about philosophies of suicide in the 18th century.

Lauren: Yay?

Emily: Yay? Starting it off on a high note for the new season.

Lauren: I am interested in learning about this, but you're right. It's not, like, a happy-go-lucky topic.

Emily: Yeah, well, it was the one that struck me, so...

Lauren: No, it makes total sense. And I'll balance it out with my pop culture connection. So we're all good.

Emily: Oh, good. Excellent. All right. So looking at the context of where Jane Austen is writing, it is the late 1780s. She is the daughter of a clergyman. Theologically, suicide has been unequivocally condemned in Christian doctrine, although there are sort of gray areas with things like martyrdom. Philosophically, the idea of its moral severity and the naturalness versus depravity of the act has really fluctuated over the centuries. There have been a lot of philosophical philosophical arguments hinging on this main point of contention, whether a person has ownership of their own life or if it belongs to God or to the gods in the case of classical philosophers who were also talking about this, pre-Christian era. So the authoritarian answer here is that only God can control the, um, disbursement of a life. In this view, suicide is equivalent to murder and should be treated accordingly, both morally and legally.

But the humanitarian answer that was coming around in the post-Renaissance and the Enlightenment era is that it's an inherent right of human dignity to dispose of your life as you will, and is also evidence of a capacity for rational reflection, the idea that humans are the only ones who engage in this act. Both arguments do have roots in classical philosophy. They're pulling on Plato, they're pulling on Cicero, they're making lots of not just Christian arguments, but also diving back into the ancient roots of philosophy as a field.

But the way Austen treats it is so interesting here, keeping in mind that she is 11 years old writing this and presumably has sort of a child's understanding of death and suicide. I think here Charlotte's death reflects from Austen both, like, not necessarily her own personal thoughts because I doubt that they were so thoroughly developed, but presumably the surrounding culture, a condemnation of the decision itself to take one's own life, but then also with this beautiful and pathetic epitaph, this sort of respect for the dignity in death or dignity of death that we also sort of have today. That also kind of briefly acknowledges the impact on the people she left behind, which has been another major philosophical argument against the morality of suicide. But I also, I have to assume that this attitude coming out is more in line with the melodrama of the romances and novels that Austen is riffing on than of any particularly strong personal conviction.

Lauren: That makes sense, especially given her age, that a lot of her opinions would have been formed by what she's consuming and not necessarily what 11, almost 12, Jane Austen has to thing has to say about suicide and philosophy.

Emily: Yeah, I don't think that this is Austen's personal commentary on suicide. I think this is Austen treating it the way it's treated in the novels that she reads.

Lauren: Exactly. Which is 100% appropriate for her age and something that most people do as they're learning what their writing style is and how they're going to do things. That's why fanfiction was so popular and is so popular, especially for young writers, because mimicking the people who you read is a good way to help figure out how you want to write.

Emily: Absolutely. So yeah, that's a little bit about the context of suicide surrounding Charlotte's death in "Frederic and Elfrida."

Lauren: That is a really good historical connection, thank you.

***

Emily: Thank you. I am looking forward to you bringing the mood up now with your pop culture connection.

Lauren: My pop culture connection is more based off of her satirical nature. At first I was going to think about what are the 12 year olds of today satirizing? 'Cause given that this is like a young Jane Austen, I was going to look and see what, if anything, are like preteens kind of looking to lampoon and to satirize. But I'm not entirely sure because I know what my friends and I found hilarious when we were 12. And that was much easier discovered when you're in that age group, but it's a little bit harder to find 12 year old spaces where they're satirizing things. And even if you were going to go onto a fanfiction website or something like that, if I were to open up Archive of Our Own, there is no way to tell if the person on the other side of that pen name is like 36 or 16.

So it was a little bit more difficult to figure out what today's preteens are satirizing, but what I can find is different literary satires that have been published over the years, and one in particular that I was thinking of, which is something that was the satire that I was reading when I was about 16, was Nightlight, which is the parody of Twilight that the Harvard Lampoon published in 2009, with character names like Belle Goose and Edwart Mullen, who live in Switchblade, Oregon. It is funny, but it is more heavy handed than 11 year old Jane Austen, which is really funny to me that 12 year old Jane Austen had more finesse than an entire Ivy League writers room. But if you would allow me, I would love to read you a selection of Nightlight by the Harvard Lampoon.

Emily: Yes, please do.

Lauren: Fantastic. There are a couple different passages that are of interest in this first chapter, so this is the opening to Nightlight. These are the very first paragraphs. And you can kind of see where it stops getting funny satirical and where somebody else in the writer's room decided to just take the joke a little bit too far. And it's interesting to compare it to Jane Austen and the different jokes that she makes in her "Frederic and Elfrida" novella. Anyway, so this is "First Look," chapter one.

"The hot Phoenix sun glared down on the car windowsill, where my bare, pallid arm dangled shamelessly. My mom and I were both going to the airport, but only I had a ticket waiting for me, and that ticket was one way. I had a dejected, brooding expression on my face, and I could tell from the reflection in the window that it was also an intriguing expression. It seemed out of place coming from a girl in a sleeveless, lacy top and bell-bottom jeans, stars on the back pockets. But I was that kind of girl, out of place.

"Then I shifted from that place on the dashboard to a normal position in the seat, much better. I was exiling myself from my mom's home in Phoenix to my dad's home in Switchblade. As a self-exiled exile, I would know the pain of diaspora and the pleasure of imposing it, callously disregarding my own pleas to say one last goodbye to the potted fungus I was cultivating. I had to coursen my skin if I was going to be a refugee in Switchblade, a town in northwest Oregon that no one knows about. Don't try to look it up on a map. It's not important enough for map makers to care about. And don't even think about looking me up on that map. Apparently, I'm not important enough either. 'Belle,' my mom pouted in the terminal. I felt a pang of guilt, leaving her to fend for herself in this huge, friendless airport. But as the pediatrician said, I couldn't let her separation anxiety prevent me from getting out of the house for eight or so years." [laughs]

And then I will switch because then it starts to just get a little bit ridiculous. But I'll fast forward to when Belle sees Edwart for the first time.

"It was then that I saw him. He was sitting at a table all by himself, not even eating. He had an entire tray of baked potatoes in front of him and still he did not touch a single one. How could a human have his pick of baked potatoes and resist them all? Even odder, he hadn't noticed me, Belle Goose, future Academy Award winner. A computer sat before him on the table. He stared intently at the screen, narrowing his eyes into slits and concentrating those slits on the screen as if the only thing that mattered to him was physically dominating that screen. He was muscular, like a man who could pin you up against the wall as easily as a poster, yet lean, like a man who would rather cradle you in his arms. He had reddish, blonde brown hair that was groomed heterosexually."

Emily: [snorts] [laughs]

Lauren: [laughing] Okay, okay. Almost done. Okay. "He looked older than the other boys in the room. Maybe not as old as God or my father, but certainly a viable replacement. Imagine if you took every woman's idea of a hot guy and averaged it out into one man. This was that man. 'What is that?' I asked, knowing that whatever it was, it wasn't avian. 'That's Edwart Mullen,' Lulu said. Edwart I had never met a boy named Edwart before. Actually, I had never met any human named Edwart before. It was a funny sounding name, much funnier than Edward. As we sat there gazing at him for what seemed like hours, but couldn't have been more than the entire lunch period, his eyes suddenly flipped towards me, slithering over my face and boring into my heart like fangs. Then in a flash, they went back to glowering at that screen."

Emily: Oh my god. I can't believe I've never heard of this!

Lauren: Oh, yeah. I think me discovering this was a product of just living in Borders for all of high school and spending all of my money on music, coffee, or books, which honestly has not changed that much. But yeah, it was written by the Harvard Lampoon in 2009 and actually like published and distributed nationally across the country. And came out, I think, after the first movie had been released and Twilight mania was really reaching a fever pitch.

And as any good satire, when something becomes a little bit too popular, good comedy, good satire punches up instead of down. Twilight was culturally dominant at that point in time. And so they're using this to poke fun, not just at Twilight, but also at the tropes that Twilight exposes, like the big city girl who moves to a small town and is just so plain and so awkward but everyone loves her and she's so misunderstood and the brooding guy who everyone wants to get to know but keeps to himself and is impossibly beautifully heterosexual groomed - just like the different things that are still tropes that persist in both the young adult media and also like adult romance as well. There are passages that I purposely didn't read just because it's not, it's interesting seeing the differences in between the passages because you can tell when someone else was able to make a decision about what was going to go into the passage because it moves from feeling the pain of the diaspora to, like, Bella basically playing fetch with her mother in the airport so that her mom is distracted and Bella can get on the plane because her mom has seen something shiny.

So it's just that - someone was brilliant in that room and someone else just had no idea of what actually makes good satire and it was just really stupid.

Emily: My god. I - the two things I will never get over - Three things. Obviously, heterosexually groomed hair, the pain of diaspora, [Lauren laughs] and the entire tray of baked potatoes?

Lauren: He wasn't eating the entire tray of baked potatoes! What human does not eat such exemplary vegetables?

Emily: [laughs] Incredible.

Lauren: I don't get it! But Nightlight just proved to me how talented 11-year-old Jane Austen was because people think that writing comedy or writing satire is easy, but writing good satire and good comedy is actually really difficult. You have to have intimate knowledge of what it is that you're poking fun of. It's a perfect example of "you have to know the rules to break the rules." And it's difficult to do well because if you go too far in any direction, then it becomes really heavy-handed and kind of loses its bite in favor of just...

Emily: Absurdity?

Lauren: Absurdity, yeah. And so reading something that was written by a group of Ivy League educated comedians versus something that was written by an 11 year old girl with a quill and ink in her home was interesting to see the difference in quality.

Emily: Yeah. Now, when you said satire of popular media, I assumed that it was going to be about "My Immortal," which definitely leans all the way to heavy-handed and fully absurd. For the uninitiated, "My Immortal" is an infamous fanfiction of Harry Potter where all the characters are goth. There's some overviews out there on the internet. I encourage you to find them.

Lauren: And people are torn if it is actually just an excellent satire of the terrible fanfictions that were being posted at that time, or if the writer was just so clueless and that bad that they just truly wrote a terrible fanfiction on accident. But I think if it's a satire, which I'm inclined to believe, it's a good example of how leaning all the way into the absurdity actually makes something really good. Again, there's a fine line because you can be too heavy-handed to where it just, the jokes don't land anymore. But if you just really go for full absurdity, then you can write a fanfiction that becomes a cultural touchstone for over a decade.

Emily: Mhm. Wow, that was so delightful. Thank you so much for evening out our mood here. [laughs]

Lauren: You're so welcome. You know, I know my job on this podcast, and today it was to provide some levity.

That's all I got, though I may include a link for Patrons in the description of this episode post to the fanfiction that I was originally going to read a selection of for this satire, because there is one that I went back into my fanfiction.net bookmarks to find -

Emily: Not the fanfic.net!

Lauren: Yes! I went into my favorite stories on fanfiction.net to find "The Secret Diary of Edmund Pevensie" because I thought it was the funniest thing I've ever read when I was 13 years old.

Emily: Ah-mazing.

Lauren: So stay tuned for that.

Emily: Thank you so much for that delightful look at how we're still doing satire today of the things that we love.

Lauren: You are so welcome. And I think that may just take us into final takeaways for our very first episode, unless there's something else I'm missing.

Emily: Yeah... All right, I recapped, so you take first final takeaway.

Lauren: I think that my final takeaway from "Frederic and Elfrida" is that.. this is probably recency bias because we were just talking about satire, but my final takeaway is that I think satire is an underused vehicle for understanding society and social commentary. And we should put more importance and I think pay more attention to satire as an art form, whether it's being written by an 11 year old or a group of 21 year olds. I think we should pain pay attention to satire and what it tells us about how people view society.

Emily: I love that. That's a very, very good point. I completely agree.

Lauren: Thank you.

Emily: Mine is very similar, but more broadly, I think that there's a lot to be understood about the philosophical social context of a writer through fiction. Obviously thinking about my historical topic and just the way that Jane Austen treats it and what that says about the works that she was reading and the context that must have produced those as well.

Lauren: Excellent. That's a great takeaway.

Emily: That wraps up "Frederic and Elfrida"!

Lauren: Wow, that was so much fun!

Emily: A whole story, one episode. This is wild!

Lauren: We're in new territory now. A lot of this is going to be one of her pieces per episode, because as you can tell, trying to break this up into multiple episodes would have had us really grasping at straws. So we get to do complete works now, for some of these anyway. Some of them will still be broken up into multiple episodes, but soon come.

[outro music]

Lauren: Thank you for joining us in this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time we'll be reading the story "Jack and Alice."

Emily: To read our show notes and a transcript of this episode, check out our website, reclaimingjanepod.com, where you can also find the full back catalog of episodes and links to our social media.

Lauren: If you'd like to support us and gain access to exclusive content, you can join our Patreon at Reclaiming Jane Pod.

Emily: Reclaiming Jane is produced and co-hosted by Lauren Wethers and Emily Davis-Hale. Our music is by LaTasha Bundy and our show art is by Emily Davis-Hale.

Lauren: See you next time, nerds.

[outro music ends]

Lauren: [laughing] Yeah, I mean, 63 is old regardless. No offense! I'm so sorry, but you can be in the AARP, so.

Emily: [laughs] I've gotten AARP offers!

Lauren: Well, technically - ok, this is completely off topic, but I found out that there is actually no age restriction to be in AARP. Like it's for retired people, but you can join it at any age and get all the discounts, and that is a life hack I was not aware of.

Emily: So, fun fact.