#lady anne darcy

My tag for Darcy stanning is #lady anne blogging because I could not love him more were I his actual mother, Lady Anne, but also, because I’ve always been super invested in Lady Anne despite how little we know about her.

In particular, I’m super invested in Lady Anne having had significant character flaws. When I was in forum Austen fandom, it seemed to me that people wanted to make her either this generically idealized maternal figure or a proto-Elizabeth (w/ the assumption that Darcy’s universally beloved father was a proto-Darcy), when virtually the only things we know about her are that Darcy remembers her as a good person, yet less amiable than his father, and that she probably tried to arrange his betrothal to her niece with Lady Catherine.

There are a lot of potential ways in which Lady Anne might have been less amiable—maybe shewas the more introverted and severe one, or a sort of softened aristocratic analogue to Mrs Bennet, or a lightly snobbish socialite, or any number of other things. It’s clear that Darcy is trying to thread the needle of criticizing his dead parents without disrespecting them, in a very happy moment of his life; there’s only so much he’s going to say at that point, even though it’s almost all we have to go on.

One of the things that really intrigues me about her, though, is that there’s this sort of … silence around her, even considering that Darcy’s parents are dead for the whole story. Wickham praises Darcy’s father, Mrs Gardiner does, Mrs Reynolds does, Darcy does. But there’s nothing like that for Lady Anne. The only person who really talks about her is Lady Catherine. And it’s interesting to think of why, in-story, that might be.