[ SECRET POST #2699 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2699 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.


__________________________________________________



11.


__________________________________________________



12.


__________________________________________________



13.


__________________________________________________



14.


__________________________________________________



15.


__________________________________________________



16.










Notes:

Bit early today, sorry!

Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 116 secrets from Secret Submission Post #386.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

That whole plot is so creepy. Sure, Miss Austen. What would be better for a teenager than to marry a middle aged dude who is obsessed with her because she looks like his dead ex?

[(Anonymous)]

35 years old is middle aged now? LOL...

[(Anonymous)]

I depends. Did the average XVIII century person live to much older than 70?

[diet_poison]

To a teenager? Yes.

[(Anonymous)]

Except that this wasn't an uncommon thing in that time period. Men often couldn't marry until they were able to make a living, and that took time. Yet then they had to consider the getting of an heir, so a 35-40 year old man wasn't going to marry a 35-40 year old woman. It meant that there was often a significant age gap between husband and wife.

Yeah, it seems weird to us, but the book makes it clear that Marianne's being a bit silly when she talks about Colonel Brandon as if he's ancient.

[(Anonymous)]

It likely would have been back in Austen's time. People often didn't live long bast age 50 in that era.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

Especially in the higher classes, where the food they ate was incredibly unhealthy.

[odessie]

Agh, okay, I can't let that one go - either your comment or the anon one you replied to. :p This particular myth bugs the hell out of me.

Life expectancy was lower then than it is now, yes, but that didn't mean people didn't live for a long time - it's an average and heavily skewed by the very high infant mortality rates. If you managed to survive past childhood (and especially if you were a man and not then likely to die in childbirth), then your actual chances of living to a ripe old age weren't that much different than they are now. 35 was definitely not middle-aged! See here or here.

As for diet, it might not have been ideal - limited vegetables outside of season of course, so in the winter they ate a lot of pease soup, gruel, bread etc. - and contained a lot more meat than modern nutritionists advise. But in many ways it was a lot better than the diet 95% of us in the Western world eat now - all local produce cooked from scratch, with no processed crap, less salt and far less sugar. The Dashwoods lived in the country and would have eaten much better than people in towns and cities, regardless of wealth.

[(Anonymous)]

Middle aged is literally someone who has lived half of the expected life. If life expectancy was 70/80, Brandon (who is iirc 35 at the beginning and 38 by the time Marianne marries him) IS middle aged.

[(Anonymous)]

But life expectancy is between 70 and 80 now (in the US, at least), and people don't consider 35 to be middle aged.

[solticisekf]

I've read a book Tea with Austin and it said that the doctors were almost killers with all the bloodletting and giving poisons as a medicine. People also ate a lot of sweets and had problems with teeth and there were wars and dangerous sailing for men and childbirth for women. I think people lived to around 60 at that time. And I don't think it's likely that they lived longer than people do now in rural places, where some live to their 100s but majority don't. The first linked site links to a graph of Amirican history? I'm not sure about this graph, can't say I understand its sources and whatnot. The second site makes no actual point, I think.

[replicantangel]

It's been awhile since I've read the book, but I'm 95% sure he says that Marianne reminds him of his former love in spirit. Not necessarily in looks. People tend to be attracted to a type, and his type is obviously the joyful and uninhibited kind of person Marianne is.

The plot is really more about Marianne becoming an adult. And women her age *often* married men his age in those days - especially military men had to establish their fortune and rank before marrying and living the life of a gentleman.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you. I don't think most people in this thread are very familiar with the historical period.