Time travel + Going into books

[trinityofone]

Two book questions for you today inspired by my desire to avoid the stuff I need to be doing:

1. I love time travel books and am always interested in recommendations in general, but right now I am specifically looking for books where characters from the past come forward to the (relative) present. Can anybody think of any?

2. I got way too much guilty pleasure out of the recent BBC miniseries Lost in Austen. It made me want to try other books (or other media?) that involve characters going into books or book characters coming out of them. I can only think of three others:

a. The Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde (meh)
b. Seducing Mr. Darcy by Gwyn Cready (appallingly awful)
c. Travel Far, Pay No Fare by Anne Lindbergh (absolutely delightful and sadly under-recognized YA book that I heartily recommend to everybody)

I know there must be others. Can you help me find them?

*goes back to not filling out unemployment paperwork, la la la*

Comments

[trinityofone.livejournal.com]

Hugh Jackman wandering around in period dress certainly is a good start. ;-) Too bad they did so little with it!

***MAJOR SPOILERS FOR LOST IN AUSTEN: LOOK AWAY IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT BUT MAY WANT TO GET DRUNK AND DO SO***

Okay, so I don't know how far you got, but basically, a combination of Amanda's presence and Elizabeth's absence fuck everything up. Jane doesn't think Bingley loves her so she marries Collins, Charlotte goes to Africa to be a missionary, and though Amanda has sparkage with Darcy, she ruins it by admitting she's not a virgin, which is of course unacceptable. Bingley becomes a drunk and runs off—chastely but stupidly—with Lydia. Everyone rushes to try to stop Lydia from being ruined, including Wickham (who's an ass but not quite as bad a guy—Georgiana lied about what happened between them because she was in love with him and he refused her). Mr. Bennet impulsively challenges Bingley to a duel and badly injures himself in the process. Amanda's fear that he's dying is finally enough to get her back to the present/real world, only Darcy follows her. (The scenes of him in London looking utterly out of his depth were actually my favorite part, and likely the reason that I want people from the past in the present stories so badly.) Amanda and Darcy find Elizabeth, who's doing really well in 2008 and loves it and doesn't want to go back. But Amanda insists that the story needs to be put back the way it's supposed to be, and Elizabeth finally agrees out of concern for her father. He does indeed pull through and everything finally looks like it's slotting back into place—Darcy seems to have decided 2008 was just a bad dream, Amanda manages to bribe/convince Lady de Bourgh to get Jane's marriage to Collins annulled because it's not been consummated, and while Elizabeth and Darcy aren't exactly getting along, he's invited her to Pemberley. Amanda is on her way out the magic door when she finds a note Darcy left there saying he remembers everything. So both she and Elizabeth decide to pursue what they really want: Elizabeth is given her father's blessing to go back to the future, and Amanda goes to Pemberley in her place to make out with Darcy but never enjoy sushi or indoor plumbing again, which seems like a drawback to me, but I guess that's the price of love!

Phew! Okay, that was probably more detail than you needed, and yeah, written out like that, it sounds COMPLETELY FRICKIN' RIDICULOUS, and it is, but for whatever reason, it worked for me. *shrug* Sometimes things that certainly aren't great literature and aren't even great television appeal anyway. I say, thank god—we all need some guilty pleasures.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

Thanks for that recap. I'm sorry I missed D and E in 2008, but not enough to watch it myself. The end is just the cop-out I feared but fits with everything that me and my friend thought historically and emotionally wrong. Worse though - now I wish I could remember which other film finished with such an implausible swap, women happily stuck in wrong time forever with nothing but possibly nookie as compensations; gahd, so annoying to not be able to put finger on right grey cells now ... wait, no explanation why fiction is fact? So there may be something like Ashes to Ashes in the future, Lost in Persuasion perhaps.