Writing Jane Austen (5 page)

She must pull herself together, this was no time to be fanciful. She sat down and placed the journal on the worn shelf in front of her. The smell of wooden floors, of ancient books, of paper and leather and learning wrapped itself round her. Time didn’t stand still in Duke Humphrey’s library, it just ceased to exist. Perhaps Henry could explain that, with his quantum universes and time running backwards and all the other witchy things that went with modern physics.

All timelessness and fancy vanished as though a magician had clapped his hands when she opened the journal and looked at the summary of the first article by Dr. H. Jesperson-Hicks.

Astigmatic bio-cultural structuralism in Jane Austen’s Juvenilia.

She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and tried again. Well,
Juvenilia
might be a good place to start, at the beginning of an author’s oeuvre. She ran her eyes down the article with growing incomprehension. Nothing in Literary Theory 101 had prepared her for this.

She’d come back to that one, clearly Dr. H. Jesperson-Hicks was advanced stuff. She went on to the next article.

Proto-synaptic supratexts versus intercolonial ratios: social relapses in Mansfield Park.

Supratexts? She was out of date, that was clear. She’d never heard of a supratext. Social relapses sounded more promising,
social
was a word she understood.

Not so. She shook her head. Get a grip. Each discipline had its own language, its jargon, its formulae for short-cutting to the substance of what the writer had to say. She could decode it for history, Eng Lit had its different vocabulary, that was all. Was there a dictionary? A glossary, explaining the meaning of arcane phrases?

Of course not, no more than there was in her own field. Who would take the trouble to provide it? Those in the know didn’t need it, and lay people wouldn’t be interested.

Concentrate. Try another one. Ah, Dr. Petronella Plimsoll, surely a sound scholar.
Northanger Abbey: Post-evolutionary diapasons as referents in architectonic tangentials of primary socio-stratificant structures.

This stuff was beyond her, that was all. She was 101, this was 999. She’d have to work her way up to it.

Get real. How much time did she have? She shut the journal, noticing how pristine were its pages. Who, among all the scholars at Oxford, had read this journal? No one? Not even Dr. Plimsoll’s supervisor, best friend, lover? No doubt Petronella Plimsoll had her own copy of the journal, carelessly left open on a desk, referred to in a lecture or tutorial, recommended on a reading list. Why should anyone read it? Should they wish to wise up on bio-cultural structuralism or post-evolutionary diapasons, they could bore themselves much more comfortably in the privacy of their own laptops.

Perhaps her pupils were given printouts, took one brief look, and tossed the pages aside before heading for the pub or the river.

Okay. There were more ways than one to approach a text. The simplest, easiest, quickest way was biography. A life. Which life of the dozens that must litter the shelves of the Bodleian? This was no time for scruples or shame.

But Duke Humphrey had lost its appeal, once the contemporary
world intruded with its incomprehensible verbiage—spells, yes. Ancient science, yes. Wizards in robes and pointy hats? Fine. Modern scholarship?

No.

She went down the worn wooden stairs and into the quad, and from there out into Broad Street, where, just across the road, was Blackwell’s bookshop.

Georgina had a vice, a habit which could best be indulged within the confined walls of a bookshop. She was a book sniffer. Before reading a word of any book she opened, she inhaled the aroma of new book that wafts out from the printed page. A publisher friend had informed her that the smell was made up of printing ink and the glue used in the binding. Paperbacks were usually unrewarding, with rough, unpleasant paper; hardcovers could be intoxicating.

She put down a glossy
Everyperson’s Guide to the Universe,
a sensory delight of smells, never mind the dazzling pictures or the clumsy title—
Everyperson
? She wasn’t at Blackwell’s to indulge her senses, this was work. She needed a good, scholarly biography of Jane Austen. A detailed one. And, the thought flitted through her mind, readable would be good. If one page of current writing on Jane Austen made her brain hurt, there was no way she’d be up for three hundred or more pages in the same vein.

The Jane Austen section ran to several shelves. She ran her eyes along the lines of books, dismissing some titles at once.
Emma
and
Northanger Abbey
and the rest of the novels for a start; she wasn’t anywhere near ready to approach The Text yet.
Jane Austen: a Neo-Freudian Approach to a Writer’s Life.
No.
Jane Austen—an Extremely Short Life.
Was that a reference to the author’s early demise—Georgina remembered reading somewhere that she’d died comparatively young—or to the slimness of the volume? It might do as an introduction, but then if she had to go on to a longer life—

“Georgina.” The voice was rich and loud, causing several people, including the brisk-looking woman at the desk, to turn their heads and look at her accoster. She didn’t need to look; she’d know that voice anywhere. A voice that belonged to Rollo Windlesham, the
Mordaunt Professor of Intellectual History. She had attended his seminars, and he had examined her doctoral thesis.

“Rollo,” she said, and was enveloped in a bear hug by the largest man of her acquaintance: six foot three in his immaculate brown brogues, more inches round his middle than she cared to think about, an assertive bow tie that barely fitted around his wrestler’s neck. Professor Windlesham had a big personality to go with his big frame, and he couldn’t care less who might be listening to his booming voice.

“What are you doing in this section? Jane Austen? My dear, clean out of your period, have you left your glasses behind? Let me guide you to a more suitable section. Or no, let me guide you out of here and into a pub.”

He might be a mound of affectation, but Georgina knew that his rather protuberant eyes were gleaming with intelligence and curiosity.

“Just the man I need,” she said. “Which is the best bio of Jane Austen?”

“Biography of Jane Austen? My dear Georgina, why?”

“I need to get up to speed on Jane Austen’s life. I’m working on the social milieu of women writers, later ones, in fact, but I want to start at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Social background, family details, upbringing, that kind of thing.”

“The choice is huge. I wouldn’t touch any of them, always thought I might write one of my own, but does the world need another life of dear Jane, I ask myself?” He ran a magisterial finger along the backs of the books. “Not that one, that’s one of the Jane Austen Laura Ashley school. Post-feminist interpretation, dear God. Theodore Spinx on
Jane Austen Our Contemporary
. And what twaddle that is. Spinx won a prize, for illiteracy one imagines. That one’s pure hack, this one’s full of Freudian rubbish.”

The woman at the desk called out, “Professor, you’ll depress my
sales if you carry on like that. Let me recommend Croft’s
A Particular World
to your friend. There, near the bottom, with a silver and red cover.”

“That’ll do,” said Rollo, flicking it out with an enormous finger and tossing it to Georgina. “No more or less rubbishy than the others, I dare say.” And then, displaying a sudden sharpness. “Got your Society of Authors’ card with you? Ten percent off, you know.”

The volume, which was, Georgina was relieved to see, a reasonable size, was paid for, put in a bag and handed over. Inexorably, she was wafted down the stairs and out into Broad Street and from there into the King’s Arms. Rollo surged through into an inner room, calling out to the girl behind the bar to bring two pints of bitter.

“Half a pint for me,” Gina amended. “And make it lager. Cold lager. This takes me back,” she said, as Rollo wedged himself behind a small table that rocked in protest. “I used to come in here every morning for a coffee when I was working on my thesis.” She liked the atmosphere: students, dons, tourists, most of them today glad to be out of the wind and the wet.

“Cold beer on a day like this will chill your gut,” said Rollo. “So much for wanting to become a British citizen, you’ll have to do better than that. So it’s Jane Austen, eh? Who else? Brontës, of course, vast interest there for the social historian. How’s the book coming along?”

Rollo was the kind of man it was all too easy to confide in. If he’d been a Catholic priest, he’d have had a line of sinners waiting to unburden themselves of their wrongdoings. There was a gravity to him, an aura of kindly, fatherly concern about him.

At your peril, Georgina told herself. Big men resembled St. Bernards—amiable, dependable, there with a little barrel of brandy and warm breath to revive you when you were dragged out of a snowdrift. Gentle giants, like the huge shire horses she’d seen at a country fair. Wouldn’t harm a beetle, except by mistake, the groom
assured her. “They’re so big, they don’t have to be afraid of anything, so it’s in their nature to be gentle. Not like Shetland ponies, bite you soon as look at you. Same with all small critters—horses, dogs, men. The smaller they are, the more they bite.”

A nice notion, but Rollo had to be the exception that proved the rule. He’d push you into a snowdrift, or down a glacier, forget about rescue. As for not crushing a beetle, Rollo’s stock in trade was to crush his fellow creatures, not physically, which would be too easy, but intellectually, and best of all, emotionally. He took no prisoners.

“Kind of you to ask, Rollo. The book’s going fine.”

“Set in a workhouse, I heard.”

“Yes. It’s a story of women’s lives, Jane and her two sisters, and how each of them ended up in the workhouse.”

“An illuminating tale, I feel sure. I so look forward to reading it. Any publication date yet?”

“That’s not my business, that’s up to my publisher.”

“I had lunch with Vesey last week in London. He was cock-a-hoop at some major deal he was pulling off. I asked him about your workhouse affair, and he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, although he was oddly confident that you would shortly be delivering what he called a shit-hot title. Americans are so gross in their language.”

“Dan can hardly keep tabs on all his authors,” said Georgina. “Ask my editor if you want the lowdown.”

“My dear!”

He didn’t need to say more, the tone said it all. The Windleshams of this world didn’t talk to mere editors.

“Jane Austen, social history,” he mused aloud. “I wonder, I do wonder.”

Had Dan Vesey said anything to Rollo? The merest hint would be enough for him to ferret out the whole story. Rollo had, rumour said, worked in British Intelligence before becoming a full-time
don. No secret was safe from him, and these days, no secret was safe with him.

“Dine with me tonight,” he said. “In hall. St. John’s has strong connections with Jane Austen, you know.”

Georgina drank some more of her beer and gave Rollo a look of intelligent interest, hoping she wasn’t showing her complete ignorance of what Jane Austen or her family might have to do with St. John’s College, Oxford. The only fact she was sure of was that the author herself could not possibly have attended that establishment.

Rollo was filling her in. ‘The descendants of the college benefactor, Sir Thomas White, were entitled to free education at the college. It was a custom that lapsed only in recent years. The Austens were descended from Tommy White, and so her father and brothers were educated at the college.”

“Of course,” said Georgina, hoping she sounded as though she’d known it all along. How many brothers did Jane Austen have? Doesn’t matter, she told herself. The biography would tell her all that, and besides, what had her brothers to do with anything?

“Seven o’clock,” said Rollo, getting to his feet. “Join me for pre-dinner drinks in the SCR. They’ll tell you where to go at the lodge. Don’t be late.”

Back at Jesse’s flat, Georgina cursed herself for being bounced into dining at St. John’s. She had planned an evening in front of the television with a portion of fish and chips from the excellent takeaway on Walton Street. Instead, here she was, sprucing herself up to spend a wary couple of hours or so avoiding Rollo’s far too astute questions.

It was a short walk from the flat to the college, and she arrived at the Porters’ Lodge at a punctual five minutes to seven. “Senior Common Room, miss?” said the porter. “I’ll point you in the right direction, it’s across the quad.”

Dining customs at the Oxford colleges had startled Georgina
when she arrived in the ancient city to pursue her postgraduate studies. Students dined in hall, which was Oxford speak for dining room. They “went to hall,” meaning they ate there. Some colleges these days went in mostly for cafeteria service, others had a mixture of early hall and formal hall, served by waiters and waitresses. Tonight at St. John’s, Rollo was taking her into formal hall. A scattering of students,
hoi polloi
in gowns, sat at long wooden tables in the body of the hall, while on a dais, set at right angles to the other tables, ran a single long table, where the Fellows of the college and their guests, including Georgina, sat. Latin grace was followed by an outburst of noise from the body of the hall, which made conversation difficult, except with one’s immediate neighbours. In this case, Rollo on one side, and an elderly Fellow who looked like a wizened elf on the other.

Georgina had to tread with care, since Rollo’s bellowed introduction had coincided with a buzz of conversation elsewhere. She was unsure whether the learned elf was an entomologist or an etymologist, and so felt it best to talk of neither words nor insects—which meant, of course, that was all she could think about. Fortunately, the Fellow, like most of his kind, had many interests, most of them to do with money. An American Fellow of the college, he informed her, had been awarded a MacArthur Genius Award, what did she think of that? No English academic body would have given him any such thing, there were even those who called his work slipshod, but of course it was a fashionable field and fashion counted for so much in certain academic circles. Half a million dollars, he understood. Tax-free. Hardly enough these days to buy a decent house, but a useful sum.