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.
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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.