ASHDOWN, SOPHRONIA

[SOPHRONIA ASHDOWN]

Player's Name: Taylor (Tayface)
Other Characters: None
Contacts: AIM - purplecorvid
Random Fact: I'm a hardcore Victorian poetry enthusiast and I like hyenas a lot. I'm also a huge dork.

Name: Sophronia Ashdown
Alias: Sophie, G. Louis Matthews (nom de plume)
Age: 23
Birthday: April 30th
Gender: Female
Species: Human
Social Class: Merchant Class
Job/Position: Shipyard owner's wife/covert aspiring gothic novelist
Sexual Preference: Heterosexual

Hair: Blonde, falls in loose curls down to the middle of her shoulder blades
Eyes: Blue
Height: 5'6"
Weight: 129 lbs

It's not that Sophronia is two-faced so much as it is that she knows how to jump through society's hoops when everyone is watching, and likes to let loose a little when she knows they're not. The young woman presents a very different aspect of herself to most people than she does to her close friends. Even her husband, Newcastle shipyard tycoon Sumner Ashdown, has yet to see the all the facets of herself that she keeps hidden from the public, though to be fair, they've not even been married a full year yet. In Sophie's mind, it's not duplicitous of her to compartmentalize her personality like she does. It's just self-preservation.

She does, after all, have a few less than entirely socially acceptable hobbies and interests.

Foremost, Sophronia is the sort of person who has to qualify quite a number of her fascinations as "morbid." Since she's been married and her husband has given her far more literary freedom than her family ever did, Sophie has picked up the habit of scouring newspapers for crime reports and obituaries. Of particular interest to her is the newly-formed Illustrated London News. She likes the pictures. Sophronia has also developed a taste for gothic novels, to the point where she has started penning some herself. She's even had one published under her pen name, G. Louis Matthews. She attributes her interest in the macabre to a bizarre need to compensate for having a happy childhood and relatively easy life. Sophie's fairly certain she's always had these... distasteful interests, but it's only recently that she's been able to really let them grow and flourish. Her husband finds them somewhat endearing.

What he doesn't find endearing, or wouldn't if he knew about it, is Sophronia's taste for the lurid and bawdy. She has a raunchy sense of humor that she only lets out with her closest and most trusted friends. Everyone else would think she was the picture of womanly virtue.

And womanly virtue is exactly what Sophie shows to the world. In public she is demure and quiet, speaking sweetly and politely. She might discuss pleasant art or theatre, but nothing too shocking. Sophie is a well-cultured young lady, with a gift for the piano and a pleasant enough, if rather low and breathy, singing voice. Sometimes she volunteers her time helping raise money for deceased shipbuilders' widows and orphans. It's that sort of thing she lets the world know about her. Nothing too deep.

Sophronia Ashdown (née Walpole) was born on April 30, 1820 to Gideon and Winnifred Walpole, a prosecuting attorney and an artist of middling talent, respectively. She was their third child and first daughter; in the years following, her parents would go on to have one more son and another daughter, with a miscarriage and a stillborn child in between. Despite the early losses of two children, the Walpoles were a happy family, never wanting for especially much but not exceptionally affluent either. Gideon Walpole was a kind man, though strict; his pretty daughters were kept especially under vigilant care. The world was dangerous out there for young ladies, after all, and sometimes ideas were even more dangerous than people. Gideon monitored his daughter's reading material with the watchful eye of an exceptionally paranoid hawk.

This changed a little when Sophie and her sister, Catherina, were sent away to finishing school. While in all technicality the schoolmarms were just as restrictive as her father had been, books got passed around like contraband between the young misses of the school. When she was fifteen, Sophie read Susanna Rowson's cautionary tale, Charlotte Temple, and it changed her life. She became engrossed in getting her dainty little hands over any dramatic novel she could get her hands on. At school, she was thought to be incredibly bookish, which was true, but she was more or less accepted because she was known to be quite a good friend, and had a quick wit. Sophronia often regards her time with her friends at finishing school as some of the best days of her life.

When she completed her years at finishing school at seventeen, her parents felt it was time for her to come out as eligible for marriage. She had three suitors her father had approved, but was very picky about them; her mother had advised her that it wouldn't do to choose unwisely with regards to a marriage. When she was twenty-one, Sophronia accepted the proposal of her favorite suitor, a wealthy shipyard tycoon named Sumner Ashdown. He was twelve years her senior, but handsome and kind and rather liberal. He believed women should be allowed more freedoms, especially where education was concerned. Throughout their courtship, it was a ritual of his to surreptitiously hand off novels and collections of poetry and newspaper articles to his intended.

Needless to say, on her wedding day, Sophronia was delighted with the new freedoms being united with Mr. Ashdown would bring her. He even encouraged her to write! However, the realities of marriage were something of a letdown in some aspects. Secretly, Sophie had been nervously excited to consummate her marriage, though she had known only the details of the mechanics of such acts. Her husband, however, found the practice rather distasteful for reasons he has never quite made clear—to say their relations have been infrequent would be putting it quiet mildly. Sophie finds herself quite anxious that they will never have children, which would displease her almost as much as it would displease her family and her husband's. Still, she makes a valiant effort to live with her husband's marital short-comings. He is, after all, a good man, and she appreciates that.

I have read and agreed to the rules of this site. I hereby recognize that my disobedience of these terms will result in punishment at the sole discretion of the admins.

Signed: Taylor