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So a couple of Sundays ago, I sat down with my morning cup of coffee fulling intending to spend the day getting Tom and Miles laid. Instead, what came out was the end of a half-finished fic I’d started in November involving Maud Holland and Rose Buck (Upstairs Downstairs 2011), a snowed in cottage in Hastings, and Christmas holiday lovemaking. When I started the fic, it wouldn’t move beyond Maud having an interminable telephone conversation with Agnes about how she wasn’t going to be in London for the holiday season. So it sort of stalled out (who wants to read other peoples’ fraught family conversations about holiday celebrations? I mean, really).

Then I sat down to get Miles and Branson naked and, whoops, Maud and Rose wanted to play instead. So here you go. It’s part two of what will be, by popular demand, at least a three-part series I’ve titled “Having Considered the Eyes of the World.” The series title comes from this passage from Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent (Hogarth Press, 1931):

“I have considered the eyes of the world for so long that I think it is time that I had a little holiday from them. If one is not to please oneself in old age, when is one to please oneself?” (67)

Because Maud Holland is basically my lesbian Lady Slade and I’d be stunned if that character weren’t a direct inspiration for the Upstairs Downstairs character herself — given their biographical similarities.

The fic:

Title: In the Tumultuous Privacy of Storm
Author: ElizaJane (erm, me)
Pairing: Maud Holland/Rose Buck
Rating: Explicit (AO3)
Length: 5,894 words
Tags: Hastings (South Essex), Long-distance, Phone Calls, Christmas, Snow Storms, Sex Toys, Family Drama, Idyllic English Cottages
Summary: Maud and Rose decide to spend the Christmas season of 1938 in a cottage in Hastings, South Essex.
Series: Having Considered the Eyes of the World

So there you have it. Just doing my part to bring F/F slash into the world.