Master Post CI5 Big Bang "The Heart in my Breast"

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

Title: The Heart in my Breast
Author: jat_sapphire
Artist: Jinky_O
Archive to Pros Lib: Yes
Genre:  Pre-Slash
Characters/Pairing: Bodie/Doyle and Marco/Rat
Word count: 11,380
Warnings: Crossover with Frances Hodson Burnett's book, The Lost Prince. No sex, sadly. There's at least one other story needed in this universe, but this one is complete.

Summary: The Crown Prince of Samavia and his Aide-de-camp come to visit England; Bodie and Doyle are assigned to guard them. Prince Ivor also wants to tell Bodie something that has been a secret since Bodie's birth. Bodie will need to make an important decision about his future. (Not the summary I originally gave the Big Bang community, but both are true.)

Note: I've been rereading this book since I was a kid. Imagine my surprise to find it has a slash fandom!

Many thanks to Jinky_O for her enticing trailer vid and lovely cover art!

Art Master Post:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/27225313

Fic Master Post: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27223564

Comments

[krisserci5.livejournal.com]

Congrats on posting!!Yeah!

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

Every year there's something. It was 4 in the blessed a m before I was done on A03. And today I found a flock of tiny typos. I hope I got all of them.

[macklingirl.livejournal.com]

Both links lead to your story? I'm happy to read it but I thought I tell you.

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I still don't know what made the link go to a different page, but I deleted, recopied and repasted. And I think it is OK now.

[sc-fossil.livejournal.com]

Now I'm behind two stories! Aak!!! Thanks, Jat, for posting. I'll read it... sooner or later!

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

I'm behind myself. We'll catch up!

[macklingirl.livejournal.com]

Now it works. Looking forward to reading the story, but I have to finish the other story first. Will come back with a comment later. :-)

[fiorenza-a.livejournal.com]

I'm quite happy to admit I'm way behind on my BB reading too, but I'm very much looking on the bright side and how many weeks of lovely Prosy reading are ahead of me :0)

I don't believe I know Frances Hodson Burnett's 'The Lost Prince', but I don't know 'The Chief' either and that's never stopped me enjoying a crossover!

And apparently there is trailer vid too - much fabulousness :0)

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen The Chief either. The Lost Prince is available free online should you want to read it. It's one of those YA-before-YA Edwardian things. A little longer than her blockbuster Little Lord Fauntleroy. I think, though, that the necessary background is in the story, if you want to just dive in. I hope you enjoy it!

[fiorenza-a.livejournal.com]

I have quite a bit of (by my standards) reading lined up, but I will look it out - I think I might like to read it.

Although, I'll probably get your work first :0)

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

I jope you like mine, whenever you read it!

[fiorenza-a.livejournal.com]

Apparently, second-hand copies abound - so I thought I would just let you know, you inspired me to buy the book - so I look forward to reading that at some point too!

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

Oh, cool! The Secret Garden was a book I got from my mother, and then discovered A Little Princess and A Lost Prince, and then that she'd wtitten several other books for both children and adults. I like the ones set in England. When she was young, her father brought them to, I think, Tennessee in 1865. Catastrophic timing, just in time to be surrounded by disgruntled Confederates and a postwar depression. She has a novel called In Connection with the de Willowby Claim that picks up the Tragic Lost Cause version of US Civil War history, including comic loyal ex-slaves. (*facepalm*) But like Louisa May Alcott, she supported her family with her writing, gotta respect that.

[sw33n3y.livejournal.com]

Congrats on winning the epic battle to get your story posted. Looking forward to reading it.

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

I hope you like it!

[fiorenza-a.livejournal.com]

'comic loyal ex-slaves', I saw a programme recently where a Southern US plantation house, which had opened as a 'stately home' for tourists, was coming in for some stick for updating their information boards and tour guide scripts to make clear that 'workers' didn't manicure the lawns, the way servants would have in the UK, slaves did.

Servants got treated like dirt, underfed 12 year olds separated from their families and set to hard labour from dusk to dawn, Downton Abby is shameful sugar coating, there's a reason the working classes upped sticks for the factories as soon as it was an option, without a backward glance, but they were paid (a pittance) and weren't bred like horses.

Even Disney was still doing chirpy slaves in 'Song of the South' - despite being warned. Rendering it unscreenable now - which I suppose is some kind of vindication.

I read 'The Secret Garden' when I was young, the only problem I found with it, because Mary Lennox's treatment of her Indian servants, while not overtly condemned, is shown as part of her overall objectionable behaviour, was the use of 'dialect' speech text. It was fashionable at the time, but I found it distractingly overused. (I try hard not to do the same thing with my Pros fic - so the ghost of FHB is with me when I write!) Still love the story though.

I suppose writing was one of the few occupations a certain class of woman could respectably have outside the home. (I do get cross with assertions that women didn't work before 'emancipation' - working class women have always worked and therefore had some degree of autonomy and independent means. Some were business women in their own right, from market traders to brothel keepers.)

I do admire women writers, even today, many resort to hiding behind androgynous pseuds in order to get a publisher to take them seriously. You'd think after Mary Shelly, Jane Austin, the Bronte sisters, Beatrix Potter, Agatha Christie et al, publishing would get it...

Anyway, my books have arrived now, so I shall be reading them when my eyes are too tired for AO3!

[jat-sapphire.livejournal.com]

Similarly to UK and European stately houses, most plantation houses are open for weddings, conferences, some historical recreations, tours, etc. The current owners don't want to be clear and historically accurate about the conditions of the slaves who did the work. If you want the horror and the details, read African-American writers. Toni Morrison and Alica Walker are my favorites. If you like Science Fiction, Olivia Butler is my pick. She has a time-travel book called Kindred that involves a modern mixed-race woman slipping into the antebellum south of her slave forebears. I haven't actually had the nerve to tead that one, though it is much acclaimed. I have read, and loved, Beloved.

Yes! There have been so many medieval, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution era, and modern businesswomen, scientists and artists, in spite of all that (I must call it) hysteria about how women could not think or work or have souls. I love to read that history, and I am so grateful that historians nowdays are writing it! I love Beatrix Potter's books, but I am also sad that she could not be the naturalist that she might have been. I read that the Black Plague meant that many women or working-class people inherited or won positions they would not have had access to if not for the pandemic! I hope the current virus does not drive us to that, and that we can have the opportunities through social change that does not involve natural disaster.

I hope you enjoy the books! I agree that dialect spellings make the regional speech harder, not easier, for teaders. I try not to use it, but sometimes I feel I can't use standard spellings for a sound that seems so diffetent from the standard. I do think that most accents are better represented through word choice anyway.

I do admire the work of women writers of the past, especially those from other marginalized groups. I taught a novel by a Native American writer named Zitkala-Sa who found a white supporter and editor. Sadly, it is not a good book, and the Author's Note, where she apologizes for her writing (which she did at night after doing manual labour all day long) and thanks the man who probably stripped her own voice out of the book, breaks my heart. But many of us succeeded anyway, and more all the time. We all just have to keep fighting.