Letter 1.
Alicia Taylor to Weston Sidney
My dearest lover
Oh how I’ve longed to meet with you again since our last encounter! My return to the city has left me ill. Before you ask I am not ill in body, but instead I am ill in temper. I was hardly able to gather the strength to scribe this letter to you, my dearest. How must I go on knowing that our previous encounter might be our last? My father–Sir John Taylor–has his eyes set on me marrying the first son of the Pemberley family, Mr. Edmund Pemberley. Oh! Just writing such truths leaves me fatigued. He would never agree to our love, and I, well I’m not sure I could convince him of such. The idea of his first, and only, daughter married to a farmer sends shivers down his spine. I, however, have long since made up my mind that my heart and soul belong to you, my dearest. By the next time my father decides on visiting the property of which you’ve made your farm, he will have married me off, and all hope will be lost. I may, however, be able to refuse the advances of Mr.Pemberley for the next few months–as my father will be on a trip to his property in the isle of Tortola. Oh, my love! Write back as swiftly as possible so that you may ease this wretched ache that has fallen upon my heart! Give me hope, so that in the coming weeks I will not dwell on my certain doom.
- Taylor
Letter 2.
Weston Sidney to Alicia Taylor
Oh, my Alicia this is quite the predicament we’ve been placed in. I would not wish these wicked circumstances on my worst enemy. It is true that in the coming months that you will be married, yes, but it is fair to say that you are not without options my dearest Alicia. You shouldn’t have to wait for your father’s permission, dare I say, why not can you marry me this instant? If it is your will, Alicia, I would take your hand in marriage the next time I set eyes on you. Yes, consider this a proposal I dare say. When your father sails to Tortola, that will be our time–during his absence we will marry. If you are already married, he will not force your hand onto the Pemberley’s. In fact, I think he will be delighted that his Alicia has taken her life into her own hands, dare I say. If it is your will, as it is mine, we shall be married upon your arrival–in secrecy.
- Sidney
Letter 3.
Alicia Taylor to Weston Sidney
My dearest lover
My word! Mr. Sidney I’ve only just now recovered from a series of fainting spells attributed to the contents of your letter. I must say, your proposal caught me by surprise. But yet your boldness has reminded me why I fell in love with you upon our first encounter. It is true we share same the will, Mr. Sidney, and I believe I would rather be stricken with the illest of pestilence than to marry a man other than you. As so, upon my father’s departure I will be able to request upon a servant who has long since been indebted to me–and request that he summon a carriage to escort me in the black of night. Yes, my dearest Mr.Sidney if it is in your will then I will put this plan into fruition.
- Taylor
Letter 4.
Weston Sidney to Alicia Taylor
Alicia, I am left jovial by our exchange of letters at this point. Let there be no more planning then, my dearest. Upon retrieving this letter, your father will have long left for Tortola and you will be able to put your plan into haste. I shall say, it is one without fault–and I believe nothing but happiness will sprout from the fruits of our planning. I look forward to your arrival, and the rest of our lives being spent on my farm where we shall one day raise a family. There is nothing to fret about my dearest Alicia, let us begin the rest of our lives.
- Sidney
Reflection:
In Austen’s novel Emma, the character Harriet’s class position is extremely blurry due to her background being very much shrouded in mystery. Since our wealthy protagonist Emma chooses Harriet to be her friend, she believes Harriet must act as though she comes from the same amount of wealth as Emma does, despite this probably not being the case. It is because of this that Harriet, despite her affections for the farmer Robert Martin, chooses not to marry him (at first), seeing as he’s of the working class–a group that Emma would not associate with due to the firm class distinctions of her time. It is worth noting, however, that Emma ends up marrying below her class anyway, as Mr.Knightley, despite being well-respected, is a landowner. In my project, I tried to explore the brewing relationship between two characters of different classes–but make the class distinction even wider than the one’s Austen included in Emma. In doing so, I have tried to highlight the challenges that would come with this pairing through back and forth letters.
In the case of my adaptation, I was specifically concerned with what it would look like if Austen created a relationship between someone of the laboring class and someone of aristocracy. The idea itself is absurd, and I believe if Austen attempted something like that, her prose would illustrate this. The letters between my two characters, Mr. Sidney and Ms. Taylor, suggests an extreme amount of naivety within these characters, specifically in Alicia Taylor. The plan they decide to go with is not very thought out on Alicia’s end, which is purposeful on my part because I wanted to highlight how many of Austen’s female protagonists start off extremely naive in the way they perceive the world. If I were to expand this adaptation, it would end up having Alicia marry Mr. Sidney, only to find out that he is not the man that he portrayed himself to be in their brief visits. In figuring out this information, it would feature Alicia running away from his farm and eventually marrying the man her father intended her to. In this sense, my protagonist is meant to reflect the naivety of Catherine Morland, Austen’s protagonist in Northanger Abbey. Alicia’s character is almost meant to mock the protagonists of gothic fiction, similar to how Austen uses Catherine Morland’s own naivety about the world to do just this. Alicia, like Catherine Morland, exaggerates everything, and each letter starts off with her mentioning how just reading the letters from Mr. Sidney leaves her ill. These satirical elements, as well as the presence of a naive protagonist, are two elements found all over Northanger Abbey.
Of what I’ve read of Austen, class is very prominent in not only Emma, but in Mansfield Park as well. Mansfield Park is a bit more subtle when relaying the wealth of the Bertrams, but it is through revealing the occupation of Sir Thomas Bertram that the reader is led to believe that the Bertram’s are of aristocracy. I tried to emulate this in my own adaptation, with it being revealed that Alicia’s father–Sir John Taylor–is a landowner in the Caribbean, specifically the island of Tortola. This is to help with the fact that when writing an epistolary novel, it would be difficult to explicitly state what a character’s dowry is. Through mentioning Alicia’s father’s occupation, we are led to believe that she comes from great wealth.
Although this is only a brief attempt at an adaption, I did however run into a few issues when trying to emulate Austen. My first problem was: in what world would an aristocrat and a farmer even have the chance to fall in love? I attempted to bypass this problem by making Mr.Sidney a tenant of Alicia’s father, thus giving the two lovers a sort of connection. It is not unlikely that Alicia and her father could often take trips from the city to the country out of boredom. I based this idea off a section in Mansfield Park, as a portion of the novel is dedicated to Bertram’s visiting Rushworth’s estate out of boredom. This in itself is an example of wealth on Austen’s part, and something I tried to emulate when I say “By the next time my father decides on visiting the property of which you’ve made your farm, he will have married me off, and all hope will be lost.” The next–and probably more trivial–problem that I encountered was how would I differentiate between a letter written by an aristocrat and one written by a farmer. I will say this is something I don’t think I accomplished this as well as I would’ve liked, simply because it is hard enough to emulate Austen’s language, and in order to differentiate between the vernacular of class, I would have to have a better understanding of how each class spoke at this time. The ways I tried to suggest a class difference was to make Mr. Sidney’s letters are a bit shorter than Alicia’s. Also, I tried to make it so Alicia’s letters are usually a bit more detailed and formal, whereas Mr.Sidney’s are generally more direct. All in all, I believe my adaptation does still resemble what an attempt by Austen to portray a relationship between an aristocrat and a farmer would look like. I do, however, believe that she would certainly have a better understanding of the vernacular of the classes at the time than I do.