Writing Jane Austen (20 page)

This was ridiculous. Her England was England struggling under the oppression of the Industrial Revolution, the heartless cityscapes of overcrowded tenements, of disease and despair. Why were these snapshots of quite another side of England trooping into her head?
Jane Austen’s England,
said that tiresome voice in her head. Jane Austen’s imaginary England, for her actual England was also full of crime and grime and misery, even if she chose not to write about them. Get away from me, she said inwardly to her unwelcome voice.

“Anna’s talking about honour,” said Maud in a brisk tone.

“Interesting, but out of date,” Henry said. “It’s every woman for herself these days, no time for niceties like caring you’ve put your signature on the bottom of a piece of paper. If they sue Gina for the money, all she needs to do is find herself a smart lawyer—well, you know one, I’m sure Jesse would act for you—and sue the Harkness and Vesey team for mental distress or loss of artistic integrity or something.”

“Be a victim, Gina, that’s the modern way,” Maud agreed.

The words stung, although Georgina was sure that they hadn’t meant them in a spiteful way. She was simply stating facts. Catch Jane Austen’s heroines positioning themselves as victims, wasn’t that what the person at St. John’s had said?

God, what a time ago that was, a different age. Before Jane Austen and After Jane Austen. BJA and AJA could be her new dating system. BJA, when she’d imagined she might be able to write that book, and AJA, when she knew she couldn’t.

Three sets of eyes on her. Where was the sympathy? Where the understanding, where the regret that she’d be jetting back to the New World before a week was up?

“Don’t judge me,” she cried.

“You judge yourself,” said Henry.

“You can do anything if you put your mind to it, that’s what all those secrets-of-the-universe books and tapes tell you. They could be right,” said Maud.

“I’ll say a prayer for you,” Anna said.

“To Saint Jude, isn’t he the patron saint of lost causes?” Georgina said.

“I don’t know this Saint Jude, but if he’s an English saint who will do the trick, then I’ll go and light a candle to him. I have some good saints, however, who are generally extremely helpful. It is a matter of faith and belief.”

“And honesty,” said Henry. “At least give it a go, Gina.”

“We’ll miss you if you leave for America,” said Maud.

Georgina screwed up her eyes and then pressed them hard with the balls of her hand, making stars jump around in her sockets.

Anna tutted with concern. “Such wrinkles if you go on like that. All this drama. The place for drama is on the page.”

“The math is against me,” Georgina said flatly. “Simply to write that number of words, the semblance of a reasonable plot or story, let alone coming anywhere near even a pale imitation of Jane Austen’s style, would take far longer than the time I’ve got.”

Henry was business-like. “It seems to me that as long as you get a manuscript to them of the requisite length, approximating to the kind of story that Jane Austen might have written, then you have fulfilled the terms of the contract. There’s no way they can say that you must produce a masterpiece. And besides, I don’t know much about the publishing process, but don’t books go through several stages before they’re published? Won’t you in fact have more time than this Mr. Vesey has given you, when you can work on the manuscript?”

That was true, although Georgina felt sure that Mr. Vesey had mentioned an ultra-fast production process, and hadn’t Livia said something about expecting her to turn in a script that would need very little work? She did remember, all too well, that Yolanda Vesey was going to trawl through the manuscript, checking sentence length and punctuation in order to make Georgina’s prose conform more closely to the way that Jane Austen wrote.

The thought of Yolanda Vesey filled her with dismay and a sense of doom.

“Sleep on it,” advised Henry.

***

Having slept for most of that day, Georgina was confident that sleep would elude her. She fully expected to spend the night tossing and turning, fretting and in anguish about the impossible situation she was in. She was quite wrong. Within a minute of turning off the bedside light, she was asleep.

She dreamed. She dreamed she was in Bath, in a house that resembled Bel’s but was different in every detail. She was standing in a marbled hall, real marble beneath her feet, painted marble on the walls. An elegant mahogany banister swirled from its newel post and rose gracefully to the first floor. A sour-faced woman in a print dress with a long apron came out of one door and went in through another.

Georgina had the ability to wake herself up from unpleasant or uncomfortable dreams, only this time she couldn’t. Rather than being part of the dream, she was an onlooker, an observer.

Dream-wise, she was wafted upstairs and into the first-floor drawing room, a room with pretty rosewood furniture, several framed portraits on the walls, which were covered in striped red and beige wallpaper, and a marble fireplace. A woman was sitting at a writing desk.

Georgina knew the trick her mind was playing on her. This was the opening scene of the Jane Austen fragment, being enacted in infuriating details in front of her. The woman writing at the desk was Lady Carcenet, and any minute now, the door would open and Susan would come in. Enter the heroine of the story, the youngest of a large family of slender means, sent to be a companion to her mother’s sister, a rich widow, who lived in some style in Bath.

The door opened, and instead of a young woman in a high-waisted dress, Livia Harkness insinuated herself into Georgina’s dream.

Georgina twisted and turned, half woke up, pummelled her hot
pillow in an attempt to make it more comfortable, and fell back into her dreams, still an omniscient watcher, with no part to play in what was going on around her.

Here was a tall man in his late thirties, a modish man, with an eye-glass and a cynical curl to his lip, looking out of place, as though he had wandered in from another story.

Lady Carcenet had an admirer, a sensible-looking man in a blue coat. Susan didn’t care for him, and who was this young man with a handsome face and a suave manner? A Wickham, a Willoughby, surely, a seducer of unwary females, a tempter, a man to lead any heroine astray from the path of virtue and into the quicksands of lust and passion.

She woke abruptly.

Lust and passion? In a Jane Austen novel? As seen on TV, maybe, but on the page, in a pastiche novel? Yet there was an erotic charge between the likes of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth, which was one reason their love affair entranced generation after generation; how had she managed to get that on the page with none of the graphic possibilities open to today’s novelists and screenwriters?

She got out of bed and padded over to her desk. She pulled open a drawer, took out a calculator and redid the sums she had already done, in case her arithmetic had been at fault. It hadn’t. Daunting, but surely not impossible? Not impossible if she had an outline, which she hadn’t. Or a plot, even, which she hadn’t. All she had was Susan and her aunt, courtesy of JA, and her own contribution of some vague figures from a tormented dream.

Georgina was a meticulous outliner, not that the screeds of research notes and chapter summaries and biographies of characters had helped her get past Chapter One of
Jane Silversmith
.

Should she just take the plunge, dive in and write whatever came into her head? Some writers worked like that, but the prospect filled her with terror.

Snowflakes. A fellow writer had told her she was a convinced snowflaker. “You build up from a really simple shape, a single key sentence, and then it gets more and more complicated. Fractal, you see.”

Fractals were in Henry’s line. Yet maybe the friend had had a point. She said that you worked and worked on that sentence, and when you got it right, there was a one-line summary of the whole book.

“There’s a website, you can read all about it on there.”

For a moment, Georgina toyed with the idea of checking out the snowflake system, but she knew websites like that were fatal. One thing led to another, and two hours later your intentions resembled some kind of a fractal, never mind your plot, and you weren’t a word nearer writing your book.

Except she wasn’t trying to write anything at the moment. She was simply aiming to find out if she had a story to write. If not, if she couldn’t come up quickly with a workable storyline, a plot, an emotional narrative, then it really was tear-up-the-contracts-and-flee-to-America time.

Concentrate on Susan. If she was the central character, then Georgina had to know her inside out. Moreover, she had to sympathize with her plight, whatever it was, but not, under any circumstances, feel sorry for her. This was the difficult part. She liked suffering along with her characters; how would she manage with one who coped?

Right. Susan was a young woman plunged into a new world. She came from a country village, the fourth daughter of a family of eight children. Her father was a vicar, with a reasonable living, but a man who found it hard to make ends meet with such a large family. Her mother was devoted to her father, but also had a lot more sense and worldly knowledge than he did. When she heard that her cousin, Lady Carcenet, was looking for a useful companion to spend
some months with her in Bath, it took no more than a moment for her to suggest Susan.

Why Susan? What was there about Susan that would make her a suitable companion for a hypochondriac who was in Bath for the sake of her health?

Lady Carcenet couldn’t suffer, either. She had to be a vigorous, interfering kind of woman, who would patronize Susan as a poor relation, the kind of woman who would be very ready to slap Susan down if she showed any signs of moving out of the station to which Lady Carcenet considered that she belonged.

Susan couldn’t be a beauty, but rather the kind of unusual, lively young woman that men would find attractive. She must have sex appeal, in fact, a concept which Jane Austen certainly understood even if the phrase had not then been invented. That might be the reason her mother had chosen Susan from among her sisters. A young woman with too much feminine charm might attract the attention of young men in the neighbourhood of whom a mother didn’t approve. And any mother would naturally hope that Susan, while in the care of her cousin, might have the opportunity to meet a much wider circle of men, and possibly, despite her lack of fortune, attract the kind of man she could be happy with.

Of course the storyline didn’t have to be stunningly original or even complex. The power of Jane Austen’s storytelling lay in a perfect depiction of the characters and the creation of the lives they lived, not in startling events or thrilling about-turns.

She felt the first stirrings of real curiosity about Susan. What kind of a young woman was she? What might happen in Bath to change her life, to send her from being a dependent relative to a prosperous wife?

Left to her own devices and desires, she’d have had Susan heading for a pile of trouble. Seduced, abandoned by her lover and cast out by her family, her life would be one of destitution and misery;
she would be driven into prostitution, poverty, despair. Loneliness, gin, bastard children and an early grave would be her lot. That was a story she could write.

Sentimental nonsense,
said her inner voice. Why should Susan, a young woman of character, fall into such a cesspit of woes? Why wouldn’t she see through the wiles of any would-be seducer, why wouldn’t she have the intelligence and strength of mind to extricate herself from any awkward situations that she found herself in? If she were an Austenesque heroine, it was most unlikely that she could possibly become such an utter loser and victim. Not because Jane Austen didn’t care to bully her heroines like that, but because her heroines had too much sense and spirit for such a fate to be conceivable.

Georgina knew she could do a Susan doomed to despair. A Susan heading for happiness was another matter. Yet Susan was nudging at her, waiting in the wings for her cue, ready to spring into action and set about weaving her destiny.

Ridiculous. Georgina had no time for writers whose characters ran away with them, taking on a life of their own and dictating the story. It had never happened to her, and she didn’t intend to let it happen now.

Without really being aware of what she was doing, she turned on her computer and began to type.

A yawning Maud found her at her desk three hours later, slumped over the keyboard, fast asleep. She slid the computer from under Georgina’s head and the words sprang to life.

Maud saved the document under the heading “Night thoughts.” Then she retreated into the bathroom, from where loud renditions of a savage song came thundering out, rousing Georgina from her slumbers for the second time that night.

Henry was fascinated when Maud reported how she had found Georgina that morning.

“Do you think it’s some kind of automatic writing?” said Maud.

“As a scientist, I don’t believe in automatic writing.”

“As a scientist, you should be open-minded. Have you ever tried automatic writing?”

“Of course not.”

“Then I don’t see how you can have any opinion about it.”

“It’s scientifically impossible.”

“Psychologically it isn’t. Psychologically, it’s probably just another way of getting the ratty, talking part of your mind out of the way and tapping into your deep imagination.”

“Where do you come up with all this jargon?”

Maud waved a hand in airy dismissal. “You know nothing about it, and nor do I, so there’s no point in discussing it. The real question is, what was Gina writing in the middle of the night?”

“You didn’t get a glimpse of it?”

“I don’t read what is on other people’s screens.”

“It’s probably a letter to her bank.”

“We’ll ask her.”

They might ask, but at that moment they would not have got a sensible reply. Georgina had no more idea of what was written on her computer than Henry and Maud did. Nor was she in any hurry to check it out; she was avoiding the desk as though what was sitting on it were a large spider rather than a laptop.