Hi readers! I hope you are enjoying a wonderful Monday so far! It is an unexpected treat to be welcoming back Don Jacobson to Austenesque Reviews today! We missed taking part in his blog tour celebrating The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion earlier this month, and we are so very glad that the stars aligned and Mr. Jacobson was able to visit with us today! If you are familiar with his The Bennet Wardrobe series, you know that in this series he illustrates different types of love. Don is sharing a bit more about what those types of love are and an excerpt from The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion. We  hope you enjoy!  

 

Austen’s Universe and The Wardrobe’s Are Powered by Love

Readers of this and other blogs over the past four years have probably discerned that I see the Bennet Wardrobe Stories as being a series of books which comprise a multi-generational biography. The story of the Bennets of Longbourn arcs from that of Christopher Bennet in 1690 (please see The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey) through the early 1960s when Eloise Robards, Lady Kitty Fitzwilliam’s daughter, contemplates a child’s swimsuit from the Edwardian period in Lizzy Bennet Meets the Countess. (A wine and scotch drinking scene from 2013 constitutes too much of a spoiler to mention here.)

Throughout the work of seven books, of which The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion, is the most recent, I have tried to guide readers through a complicated sequence of interlocking events as Bennets learn that which they must to realize the Wardrobe’s true mission.

As I have worked to explore the ramifications of each story, I have discovered that each of the Bennets examined thus far have all found love as the mobilizing force in their lives beyond the end of Pride and Prejudice. Love is what powers the Wardrobe.

As I wrote in my opening pages of The Avenger: Thomas Bennet and A Father’s Lament:

C.S. Lewis in his 1958 lectures on the BBC identified four types of love governing positive human interactions:

Storge: Empathy Bond

Philia: Friend Bond

Eros: Erotic Bond

Agape: Unconditional Love.

I have discovered that the Bennet Wardrobe operates in the service of a Fifth Love:

Exagoras Agapis: Redemptive Love.

If we add Niebuhr’s formulation in as a Sixth Love, t’would read as

Synchotikí agápi: The Love which Forgives

As I now read the Fifth and Sixth Loves, I am compelled to look back at the first four propounded by Lewis. Storge, Philia, Eros, and Agape are purely descriptive; used by Lewis to allow observers to categorize human relations. This, of course, does not lessen their impact. Rather, we are now allowed to look at the interactions between Austen’s characters and understand why the behave as they do.

The latter two…Exagoras Agapis…the love that redeems…and Niebuhr’s Synchotikí agápi…the love that forgives…are thoroughly different from Lewis’ Four Loves. They are active, while descriptive in one fell swoop.

As I noted above, the Four Loves are observational. In Pride and Prejudice, Darcy feels Passion for Lizzy. We, as readers see their love as Eros and ultimately (we are led to believe) Agape.

Bennets in the throes of the Fifth and Sixth Loves actively move to moderate, to change their existences. They change their behaviors. They forgive others to remove the final obstacles to attaining what is the Nirvana-like level articulated by Lewis, the deepest Spiritual Love, Agape.

Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice, uses Fifth and Sixth Love methodology without clearly highlighting it. I tend to be a bit more overt in my work. I call it out as did Mrs. Bennet in The Avenger: Thomas Bennet and a Father’s Lament.

~~~

The form/not form/color/arc shot throughout the vault, as if rejoicing in its liberation. In its passage, a calming smoothed the matte surface that was the slate of her inner being.

exagoras agapis

Exagoras agapis? What is that? From where did it come?

the love that redeems

given you by the Bennet, grasped by your soul

the desire to be the better version of self

But why now?

Founder needs you, your strength. but I cannot…

too new…draw closer for help

~~~

In Pride and Prejudice, because Darcy uses Exagoras Agapis, the love which leads him to try to remedy his failings to create the best version of himself for the woman he desperately hopes to wed, the end of the book is possible. Well, actually, not until Elizabeth uses her love to forgive Darcy (and, perhaps herself as she has changed through her own process of Exagoras Agapis).

Synchotikí agápi closes the circle.

Thus, in the bilateral relations which populate the Austenesque universe, we observe bonds of friendship, empathy, passion, and the ultimo. However, for the characters themselves, their inner discourses are characterized by quests to improve themselves to become worthy of the forgiveness so necessary for them to achieve final joy.

Such is the most powerful force in Bennet Wardrobe Universe…or this one for that matter.

Speaking of the Loves, I commend to you Darcy’s confession in the excerpt below. Here is the Fifth Love articulated.

~ Excerpt from The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion ~

This excerpt is from Chapter LXII of the story. This is found in Book Three, “Fitzwilliam” in the first moments after General Sir Richard Fitzwilliam has proposed to and been accepted by Lydia Wickham. It is set at the Selkirk Harvest Ball of 1819, two months after Lydia was injured at the Peterloo Massacre while saving Fitzwilliam’s life.

If Wilson was surprised at the closeness of the two bodies that exited back into the ballroom, the planes of his face never betrayed it. Instead, like great slabs of granite making up the immutable walls of the Jüngfrau, they lay still beneath the blue ice chips that were his eyes.

However, his mind understood the difference in the couple’s relationship by the way in which Mrs. Wickham nestled into the angles formed by the General’s arm, torso, and hips.

The unitary nature of the man and the woman also did not escape the notice of those who had been waiting upon their return: the Marquess, the Earl and Countess, the other three Bennet sisters. As General Fitzwilliam and Mrs. Wickham passed across the room on their way to the family circle, knowing nods and envious whispers erupted in their wake.

By the time they reached the Matlock party, the fact of a betrothal was a foregone conclusion spurred on by the candlelight glinting off the emerald on her right hand. Then the parties split: ladies to gather on the edge of the dance floor, gentlemen to surround the Marquess where he sat.

Darcy and Bingley both clapped Richard on the shoulder.

Charles, in his normal affable manner, cheered, “Well, that’s it. ‘Tis official. The rest of England now must go into mourning. The last of the Bennet women is once again off the market!”

Darcy was more circumspect, “Allow me to wish you joy of the deepest kind, cousin. I have watched you plow ahead in your life, playing the high-flying grasshopper to us mere mortal ants. Oh, I know you have many serious matters to which you must attend, but they are affairs of state…not of the heart.

“Now you will know the wonders of quiet interludes before a fire sputtering titian orange on a winter’s evening.”

Edward Benton waggishly interrupted to add, “Of course, the less-than-calm moments when your lady wife is convinced that all would have been well if only you had behaved how she instructed you to act may have you longing for the time before you were leg-shackled.

“If your Lydia is anything like my Mary, she will be of the decided opinion that women know exactly how men should act even when they are at Angelo’s or White’s and utterly without the benefit of female direction.”

Darcy shot his vicar a look that sparkled before resuming his declaration, “I tell you this, Richard, I have had problems sketching Lydia Wickham’s nature. But now I can tell you…and this is not Elizabeth talking…she is the best of women.

“The Lydia Wickham we see standing over there with your mother and her sisters is not the Lydia Bennet who absconded from Brighton with Wickham.

“I was slow to let go of my prejudice against her. My first inkling that she was not the same as a woman of nine-and-ten as opposed to when I first met her: a mere girl, barely out, and then only in the country, came that day in the Year Fifteen. T’was then that she outplayed Prinny at Darcy House.”

Richard broke in, “I know, Darcy. I was there.”

Darcy raised a quelling hand, “Allow me to finish my confession, or I will never do so. I have much laid against my account. I have truly blotted my copybook when it comes to Mrs. Wickham.

“Elizabeth told me that her sister had changed thoroughly after she had encountered a lady of great distinction in the Year Twelve. After that, though, I did not see her often except when Georgie would invite her to Pemberley. I tended to find reasons to be away from the house when she attended…to my own loss, I now believe.

“Over the last four years since Wickham died, I have found myself in her company on many occasions. Never once did she display that uncontrolled hoydenish nature that was her mark in Meryton.

“She instead has treated all with the deepest respect. From “her widows” to Mrs. Smithvale’s students, my wife’s sister has been generous and open. I have been forced to admit that perhaps I had been wrong in assuming that Mrs. Wickham’s personality was fixed and immutable.

“I had to apply the lessons I learned with Elizabeth.

“And that, I can assure you, cousin, was a painful process the first time I misapprehended a Bennet woman. The second time—with your lady, Bingley—showed me that I had better reassess all my notions lest I be the one found wanting.

“I find that I should have used my observations of Miss Mary Bennet after the fire as the measure against which to consider Mrs. Wickham. That I did not is an error which denied me the pleasure of a truly wonderful woman’s acquaintance.

“Lydia Wickham has taught me that my most grievous error was strutting around whilst clutching that ridiculous notion: ‘Once my good opinion, once lost, is lost forever.’

“You see, it implied that because I was not willing to change, was unable to alter the contours of my mind, I believed that every other person was equally hindered.

“Elizabeth was so correct! I was conceited, arrogant, and pompous.”

Darcy raked a hand through his carefully-styled hair adding even more disarray to the studied dishevelment over which his valet had labored for nearly a half-hour.

Then the Master of Pemberley straightened his spine, tugged at his waistcoat to remove every wrinkle, and shot his cuffs before launching into his final words.

“You, Richard Fitzwilliam, have captured the last Rose of Hertfordshire.

“She is, I am now convinced…and no disrespect is intended for any of the other three Bennet ladies to whom we are married nor to Miss Kitty where-ever she may be…nonpareil.

“Lydia Wickham is a diamond of the first water, and any man so fortunate as to win her heart must count his life as made from the instant she consented to be his wife.

“I fear, though, that you, Richard Fitzwilliam, are not up to snuff.

“Can you throw off nearly two-dozen years of indolent and frivolous living as a soldier of the ton? She may be a widow, but I would not have you treat her as one of those formerly-bereaved ladies who inhabit drawing rooms and parlors on the fringes of polite society.

“Do not break her heart or you will have three angry brothers hunting you down like the dog you would be.”

Fitzwilliam was rocked by the way Darcy had concluded his speech. True, there was a bit of humor thrown in, but the General was under no illusion that if he toyed with Lydia, he would be faced with three adamant gentlemen seeking to rearrange his already battered features. He could survive one bout, but even the Reverend Edward Lucas Benton looked as if he had done more than his share of rounds at Gentleman Jackson’s parlor. And that cleric’s unusually-shaped eyes were scanning Fitzwilliam’s figure, apprising him much as gentlemen at Almack’s tried to divine a debutante’s fortune by the cut of her gown or her diamond earbobs.

Richard could say nothing in response to the ferocious glares of his three friends circled about him. They now looked more like lean and hungry tabbies apprising a particularly plump coney trapped on the lawns two dozen feet from the nearest hedge. All Fitzwilliam could do was solemnly bow his assurances to each of them.

This excerpt is from The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion. ©2019 by Donald P. Jacobson. Any reproduction—either electronic or in print—of this work without the expressed written consent of the holder of this copyright is expressly prohibited.

Thank you so much for sharing, Don! I really appreciate the in-depth study of the 6 types of loves featured in your novels. And I am eager to see and understand the culmination of these loves through the next installments of The Bennet Wardrobe series.

One of the things I love about the Bennet Wardrobe universe is exploring the possibility of Lydia being with Colonel (General) Fitzwilliam. I cannot wait to see more of their relationship in The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion! Sounds like a happy match, indeed!

~~~

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