Literature fanfic: "Between within and without" (my 2015 RarelyWritten story)

[brightknightie]

For this year's rarelywritten game, I went where I've rarely gone before: fanfiction of source material that is itself prose narrative! I've often been just a little uncomfortable, personally, with fan creations in precisely the same medium as the original. The element of transformation is stronger when the medium shifts. The comparison is less fierce, as well, perhaps. I've seen it done wonderfully! But I don't usually seek it out. Personal thing.

Then I saw this request.

Daniel Deronda (1876) was George Eliot's last, and perhaps most ambitious, novel. The ficathon request that I received was: what does Gwendolen, one of the two main characters, do post-canon? To make a long (~900 pages) story very short — spoilers! — Gwendolen's own personal tale (among all those in the novel!) is that of a splendidly self-centered young woman who chooses what turns out to be an obscene marriage as an escape from sudden poverty. Her bitter experiences crack her complacency, and leave her terrified that she will choose to kill her husband. Many would not blame her! But she would blame herself. She was never actually wicked, this infuriating, irresistible "princess in exile." Her one confidant is the titular Deronda (who has quite an astonishing tale of his own! nothing else like it in Victorian literature, for sure).

My attempt to satisfy the fest request involves a London townhouse, a dinner party, a seance, and several friendships.

My sincere thanks to those who chimed in on my various brainstorms! And thanks most of all to batdina for beta-reading! (She re-read this monster Victorian novel just for me and my recipient. Much appreciated.)

On the AO3:	"Between within and without"
Length:	6,689 words
Date:	April 2015
Rating:	G
Characters:	Gwendolen Harleth Grandcourt, Catherine Arrowpoint Klesmer, Julius Klesmer, Mrs. Arrowpoint, Lady Pentreath, original characters
Summary:	Five years later, Gwendolen steps up to help a dear friend and ends up confronting an old terror.
Quotation:	"That she was beautiful had never been in doubt, as far as Gwendolen knew, but that she could meet her own gaze with neither revulsion nor complacency required tenacious confirmation. To live, she must bear her demons and her angels together. She meant to live."

Comments

[argentum_ls]

That is ambitious! Good for you for pushing out of your comfort zone. I've read a few stories that were based on written works, but I've never dabbled in it myself, and I'm not sure I'd ever have the gumption to take on a Victorian novel. I'm really impressed that you were able take on such a project and see it through.

[brightknightie]

Thank you! It was an adventure!

If daring to fanfic any prose narrative, though, it would most naturally be Victorian literature for me. Not only are they comfortably out of copyright, they're every bit as much my MA thesis topicfandom as anything short of my beloved FK. ;-)

[lightbird]

Kudos for stretching yourself outside your comfort zone!

I rarely seek out fics based on prose fandoms (and I haven't written any) and with only a couple of exceptions the ones I have sought out were already adapted to the screen. For example, I enjoyed the Harry Potter books but never read any fics until after the movies, and whenever I read those fics I have the actors' faces in my head for each character as I read.

One of the biggest challenges I think for writing as well as appreciating a fanfic from a straight prose fandom is capturing the author's style and tone. I've read some fanfic for Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book, starting with an author whose other work I enjoyed. Some of the stories read like they could have been part of the original work, some didn't quite get there. Good for you pushing yourself, and taking on a Victorian novel (and an ambitious one) is amazing.

I've read other George Eliot but not Daniel Deronda. Sounds interesting - I'll have to add it to my (already long) to-read list. But it sounds like with the summary you've provided here, canon knowledge is not otherwise needed to enjoy your story.

[brightknightie]

Thank you! It was a bit breathless from time to time! Striving to sound like George Eliot... how dare I? Yikes. :-)

Yes, exactly, in the direction of your Gaiman experience: the main reason -- after deference to living authors with in-copyright works who may object -- that I don't personally seek out fanfiction of prose original works is that I'm wary of confusing the author's voice in my head. When I read a Bujold novel, for example, I want Bujold's voice alone in my imagination, not that of even the very best fanfiction writer ever. I don't want to accidentally conflate the two, and I'm afraid that I will -- that my brain will stock it all together, jumbled up. (At least as long as the canon is open, and the fanfiction is set within canon's bounds.)

Daniel Deronda is an absolutely amazing novel that almost all literary critics say is flawed -- that it's an unsuccessful attempt at a masterpiece, that the two halves of the novel just don't integrate successfully. And yet Eliot's "failures" are miles above most authors' successes. That "flaw" is doubtless why it cries out for fanfic in a way her other books don't.

There is a BBC TV adaptation, and in many ways it's quite good! The casting is top-notch. You just can't get the flavor of Eliot from an adaptation.

>"But it sounds like with the summary you've provided here, canon knowledge is not otherwise needed to enjoy your story."

I hope so! I tried to make it as much as possible a standalone, and to introduce each character anew, with the excuse that it had been five years since the reader saw them in canon.