in which we read Sense and Sensibility with Allegra
Apartial list of things not found in the books of Jane Austen:
locked-room murders
punishing kisses
girls dressed up as boys (and rarely the reverse)
spies
serial killers
cloaks of invisibility
Jungian archetypes, most regrettably, doppelgängers
cats
But let’s not focus on the negative.
“I don’t think there’s anything better in all of Austen than those pages where Fanny Dashwood persuades her husband, step by step by step, not to give his stepmother and sisters any money,” Bernadette said. She repeated the same point in a variety of unilluminating ways while Allegra listened to the soft percussion of rain on the roof, the windows, and the deck. Bernadette was dressed today in something resembling desert robes, only periwinkle blue. Her hair had been cut, which left it less scope for improvisation, and she looked very nice, which was all the more remarkable for being a bit of magic done without mirrors.
It was cold out, and wet, the way it gets in April just when you’ve convinced yourself that spring is here. Winter’s last laugh. The book club was circled about the woodstove in Sylvia’s huge living room, with the stove door open and the flames wrapped tight about the logs. Overhead, a hundred bird’s-eyes in the high bird’s-eye-maple ceiling looked down on the little gathering.
Allegra’s elbow often ached when it rained, and she rubbed it without noticing she was doing so until she saw her mother look at her, which made her stop and think of something diverting to say. “I like a progression,” she agreed. “Repetition is tedious”—this aimed at Bernadette, but Allegra wouldn’t have said it if Bernadette had been likely to get it—“because there’s no direction to it. I especially like a progression that turns things completely over. Takes you pole to pole.”
Allegra was a creature of extremes—either stuffed or starving, freezing or boiling, exhausted or electric with energy. She’d moved back home the month before, when her father had moved out. Jocelyn looked at Allegra approvingly. She was a very good daughter. Sylvia would have been very lonely there without her.
No one could be lonely with Allegra in the house. Such a vivacious presence, her company must be a great comfort. Except that—really Jocelyn didn’t wish to even be thinking this—Allegra, well, she felt things very deeply. It was one of her delightful qualities; she wept with those who wept.
Sylvia’s boys could be very comforting, too, especially Diego. Andy couldn’t manage a sustained sympathy, though he was good for an hour or two. It was too bad Diego couldn’t come. Of course, he couldn’t; he had a job and his family. But Diego would have cheered Sylvia up. While Allegra sometimes felt things so deeply you ended up consoling her even when the tragedy was entirely your own.
Jocelyn imagined Sylvia compelled to put a good face on things for Allegra’s sake. To have to appear happy when she was so miserable. Who would require it? She imagined Sylvia making Allegra soups and running her baths, Allegra collapsed on the couch, tucked up in shawls and plied with tea. Really, it seemed too much, that Sylvia should be caring for Allegra at such a time. A surreptitious look at the CD cases scattered about the player told Jocelyn that someone had been indulging in a good wallow, and this someone was not Sylvia, not unless she’d developed a sudden taste for Fiona Apple. How could Allegra be so selfish?
But then, she’d always been a difficult child. Beautiful, beyond a doubt. She had Sylvia’s dark eyes and Daniel’s bright hair, her face the best possible combination of the two, her figure like Sylvia’s, but sexier. Yet none of her parents’ steadiness or placidity. When happy, she was uncontrollable, when sad, inconsolable, until she changed—fast as a finger snap—long after you’d given up. Sylvia had a repertoire of tricks that had worked on the boys when they were little. “If you were a dog I’d cheer you up by rubbing you behind your ears,” she’d say, rubbing as described. “If you were a cat, I’d scratch under your chin,” scratching. “If you were a horse, I’d pet your nose. If you were a bird, I’d stroke your stomach”—doing so—“but since”—quickly lifting his shirt—“you’re a boy”—she would blow wet, loud blasts of air onto his belly until he was gasping with laughter. This same scene would send Allegra into a fury.
One day when she was four years old, while leafing through Sylvia’s beauty magazines, Allegra had taken offense at how much white space she found. “I don’t like white,” she’d said. “It’s so plain.” She burst into tears. “It’s so plain and there’s so much of it.” She sat for more than an hour, sobbing, working her way through the pages, coloring in the whites of people’s eyes, their teeth, the spaces between paragraphs, the frames around ads. She was sobbing because she could see that she would never be done; her whole life would be used up in the hopeless, endless task of amending this single lapse in taste. She would grow old, and there would still be white sheets, white walls, her own white hair.
White snow. “The whole beginning sequence has something of the fairy tale about it,” Grigg said. “With a lovely twist. Once upon a time, after the death of her beloved husband, a gentle stepmother was forced to live in a house ruled by her wicked stepdaughter.”
Allegra was sort of our hostess this month, but it was Sylvia’s house and Sylvia’s food, so it was sort of Sylvia. In this role, whatever role this was, Sylvia was determined to treat Grigg well today. He’d been the last to arrive, which had made her wonder whether he was coming, and therefore all the more pleased when he showed. Bernadette would never forgive them if he left early again. He had just made a very interesting point.
“Such an interesting point,” said Sylvia. “In fact, in a society where money passes to the eldest son, this can’t have been an unusual case? But how often does it appear in books? The problems of older women don’t interest most writers. Trust Miss Austen!”
“But the book isn’t really so much about Mrs. Dashwood as about the young, beautiful daughters,” Prudie pointed out. She had come straight from a meeting of the teachers’ union and was, therefore, uncommonly lipsticked and politicized. Her eyebrows had grown back in a bit, or else she’d painted over the deficiency; that was a relief, but the voice she was using was a public-speaking voice and that was an aggravation. It was, Sylvia supposed, an occupational hazard, more to be pitied, and so on. Her articulation would surely become more normal as the evening progressed. “Once it actually gets going. Colonel Brandon’s not much younger than Mrs. Dashwood, but he falls in love with her youngest daughter, never her. An older man can still fall in love. An older woman better not.”
Prudie had spoken without thinking, but the thinking came rapidly behind. What a faux pas she’d just made, though, in justice, she felt that she wasn’t the sort who often stumbled that way. Of course, this only made it more obvious when she did. Rumor had it that Daniel was seeing someone, had, in fact, left Sylvia not because the marriage had gone bad, but because he’d been hit by the thunderbolt. Prudie looked for something to add that would make it clear she hadn’t been speaking of Sylvia, though, honestly, not that Sylvia wasn’t attractive enough for her age, but what could her prospects be at fifty-whatever?
“Not,” Prudie said, but Bernadette had spoken at the same time and Bernadette was the one who carried through. Bernadette was the one who carried on. The rain ticked off the time while she spoke. The fire turned from blue to orange, pole to pole. The log in the stove fell.
Bernadette was capable of speaking and enjoying the stillness of the scene at the same time. Nothing disturbed her peace less than the sound of her own voice. Sylvia’s house was so much quieter than Jocelyn’s. Sylvia lived downtown, near campus but back from the street, directly behind the Phi Beta Pi sorority, unless it was the Pi Beta Phi. This was a hidden, tranquil location, except during rush, when the girls gathered on the lawn for a week, singing, “I want to be a Phi Beta Pi [or the other], boom, boom,” like sirens to sailors. Of course, the club wouldn’t have met here if it had been rush week. If Daniel had moved out during rush week, Bernadette would have completely understood. Jocelyn had told her that Daniel was seeing someone young enough to be his sister.
Jocelyn knew how a child felt when her father decamped. But surely it was different when the child was grown-up and had a place of her own. Allegra had every right to miss her father, just not the way Sylvia did. Sylvia was daily deserted; Allegra had merely had her Christmases spoiled. From now on there would be no place to come where she felt entirely at home. Her holidays would be split down the middle, like a grapefruit.
December was still months away, but Jocelyn knew enough about Allegra to guess that she’d already thought of it. Christmas had always been such a big deal to her. As a child she’d spent the days leading up to it sick with apprehension, so afraid that she wouldn’t like her gifts, that the wishes closest to her heart would go unattended. She would cry herself to sleep at night, anticipating her disappointment. By Christmas morning she’d have the whole family exhausted and peevish.
In fact, her requests were never difficult or expensive, and there was no reason not to indulge them. From the moment the actual getting began, Allegra was wild with delight. She loved surprises and ripped her presents open, with cries of joy for whatever was inside. “For me?” she’d ask, as if it were too much to believe. “More for me?”
Every year she’d be given a sum of money with which to buy presents as well, and she spent it thoughtfully, but it never went far enough. So she added things that she’d made, drawings for her brothers and books of stapled pictures for her parents and Jocelyn. Ashtrays and ornaments. Stones and pine cones painted with glitter. Bookends and calendars. As she grew older these handmade gifts outstripped the store-bought ones. She was not—she was quite insistent on this point—an artist. But she was clever. Her father taught her to use power tools, and she opted for shop in high school rather than the cooking class. By then she was designing furniture and jewelry. The glass-top coffee table on which Jocelyn had just set her purse was something Allegra had made back then, and it was as nice as anything you saw anywhere.
Now she sold her things in stores, online, and at craft fairs. Her current project was to collect damaged jewelry at flea markets, dinged beads and bad cameos, and crush them, pressing the resulting bits into fish-scale mosaics. Sylvia was wearing a new bracelet made of mismatched earrings caught together in a delicate chain. It was a great deal prettier than it sounded, and showed that Allegra’s heart, as always, was in the right place. The year before this she’d joined a caroling group in San Francisco and spent her Christmas Eve singing second soprano in a round of hospitals and nursing homes. Sylvia had a picture of her on the mantel, wearing a purple robe and carrying a lit candle. A silver frame of Allegra’s own making. A madonna with fire-bright cheeks, eyes like mirrors.
Austen’s minor characters are really wonderful,” said Grigg. “Good as Dickens’s.” Sylvia was very glad to have Grigg speaking right up this way. She wouldn’t have taken issue for the world, and anyway, what was there to possibly take issue with? There were authors whose names she didn’t like to use in the same sentence with Austen’s, but Dickens had written some very good books in his day. Especially David Copperfield.
“And speaking of Dickens,” Grigg said—were they never to be done speaking of Dickens!—“I was trying to think of contemporary writers who devote that same care to the secondary characters, and it occurred to me that it’s a common sitcom device. You can just imagine how today Austen would be writing ‘The Elinor Show,’ with Elinor as the solid moral center and the others stumbling into and out of her New York apartment with their wacky lives.”
Sylvia could imagine no such thing. It was all very well to point out fairy-tale themes in Austen; Sylvia had done this herself. Pride and Prejudice as “Beauty and the Beast.” Persuasion as “Cinderella,” et cetera, et cetera. It was even all right to suggest that Dickens also did well what Austen did superbly. But “The Elinor Show”! She did not think so. What a waste those eyelashes were on a man who watched sitcoms.
Even Bernadette was silent with disapproval. The rain drummed on the roof, the fire sputtered. The women looked at their hands or at the fire, but not at one another. It was Allegra who finally spoke. “Good as the secondary characters are, I do think Austen gets better at them in her later books. The women—Mrs. Jennings, Mrs. Palmer, and that other one—are kind of a mishmash. Hard to keep straight. And I loved Mr. Palmer’s acid tongue, but then he reforms and disappears very disappointingly.”
In fact, Allegra had instantly recognized herself in the sour Mr. Palmer. She, too, often thought of sharp things to say, and she said them more often than she wished. Mr. Palmer didn’t suffer fools and neither did Allegra, but it wasn’t something she was proud of. It didn’t spring, as Austen suggested, from the desire to appear superior, unless lack of patience was a superior quality. “Plus”—Allegra allowed herself one more moment’s irritation over the silencing of Mr. Palmer—“I do think Sense and Sensibility stretches our credulity at the end. I mean, the sudden marriage of Robert Ferrars and Lucy Steele! The later books are more smoothly plotted.”
“It requires some hand-waving,” Grigg agreed. (That stern moment of silence utterly lost on him! What would it take?) “You see, of course, the effect Austen’s going for, that moment of misdirection, but you wish she hadn’t had to go to such lengths for it.”
The Austen-bashing was getting out of hand. Sylvia looked to Jocelyn, whose face was stoic, her voice calm but firm. “I think Austen explains it very well. My credulity remains unstretched.”
“I don’t have any trouble with it,” Sylvia said.
“Perfectly in character,” said Prudie.
Allegra frowned in her pretty way, chewing on a fingernail. You could see that she worked with her hands. Her nails were short, and the skin around them rough and dry. You could see that she took things to heart. Hangnails had been teased loose and then stripped, leaving painful peeled bits by her thumbs. Prudie would have liked to take her somewhere for a manicure. When your fingers were long and tapered like that, you might as well make the most of them.
“I suppose,” Allegra conceded, “if the writer’s not allowed to pull an occasional rabbit out of a hat, there would be no fun in writing a book at all.”
Well, Prudie thought, Allegra would be the one to know where writers found their fun. Prudie herself had no problems with girl-on-girl. She opened her mouth to tease Allegra about her book-writing girlfriend, which would certainly make this point, as well as alert Grigg to the lay of the land.
But Grigg was agreeing again. Really, he had become very agreeable where Allegra was concerned! He was seated next to her on the couch, and Prudie tried to remember how this had come about. Had it been the only seat left, or had he schemed for it?
Usually Allegra managed to work her sexuality into any conversation. This was a point of contention with her mother, who thought it rude to press sexual details onto slight acquaintances. “Your paperboy doesn’t need to know,” she’d say. “Your mechanic doesn’t care.” Allegra would never believe that homophobia wasn’t at the bottom of this. “I won’t be closeted,” she declared. “It’s not in my nature.” But now, just when the information might be usefully shared, she was suddenly, irritatingly silent on the subject.
“How’s Corinne?” Prudie asked impishly. “Speaking of writers.”
“Corinne and I have gone our separate ways,” Allegra answered, which Prudie then remembered she’d been told. Allegra’s face had turned to stone. But that business with Corinne had been months ago, surely. Prudie trusted that it wasn’t too sensitive a subject to be raised now. No one had told her they were never to mention Corinne’s name, because she was certainly capable of holding her tongue when necessary.
Grigg was flipping through his enormous complete-works-of. Why did men always have to have the biggest books? It wasn’t clear he’d even heard.
While Allegra liked to describe herself as a garden-variety lesbian, she knew that the truth was more complicated. Sexuality is rarely as simple as it is natural. Allegra was not entirely indifferent to men, just to men’s bodies. She was often attracted to the men in books; they seemed, as a rule, more passionate than the women in books, though actual women seemed more passionate than actual men. As a rule.
Allegra was aroused most by passion itself. Poems of the confessional sort. Vistas, all kinds, even swampy. Swelling music. Danger. She needed to feel to feel alive.
Adrenaline was her drug of choice. This was not something she talked much about, and especially not to people who knew her mother. Sylvia believed in being careful, though she also believed that being careful was often not enough. She saw the world as an obstacle course. You picked your way across it while the terrain slipped about and things fell or exploded or both. Disasters arrived in the form of accidents, murders, earthquakes, disease, and divorce. She’d tried to raise sensible, cautious children. During the high school years, when Allegra knew that Sylvia had been congratulating herself on her daughter’s good appetite, good grades, sweet friends, sober habits, Allegra had been cutting herself.
Allegra and Corinne met in a small plane on Allegra’s twenty-eighth birthday. She’d spent the night with her parents, and her dad had made her waffles in the morning. Then she’d left, telling them she was meeting friends back in the city. Instead she’d gone to a tiny airport in Vacaville for an appointment she’d made months earlier. This was her very first solo jump. She hesitated at the last minute, with the sky roaring past her—she wasn’t insane—and wondered whether she was going to go through with it. She was more afraid than she’d been on her first tandem jump. She’d been warned of this, but it still surprised her. If she could have backed down without anyone’s knowing, she would have. Instead, merely to save face, she threw herself out. She pulled the cord too soon. The instant she did, she wished she were free-falling again. That was the best part, and she saw she would have to do this again, and better next time. The chute opened, jerking her upward, taking her breath, the straps compressing her breasts. She grabbed the cords, pulled herself into a better position. How odd, to be minding the uncomfortable straps at the very moments in which she was plunging to earth from a plane. “That’s one small step for a man, and it’s a bit hot in this spacesuit.”
The fall became quiet, contemplative. She was surprised at how long it seemed to last, how she experienced each second of it with such clarity. She came down hard, landing on her butt and then tipping so that she crushed the point of her elbow, and her butt hurt immediately, but she didn’t feel her elbow at first. She lay, looking up, with the chute spilled behind her. Clouds floated, birds flew. Her blood was still plummeting deliciously. Corinne and the tandem master drifted over her. Allegra could see the bottoms of Corinne’s boots, which meant Corinne was in the wrong position. Like Mary Poppins.
Allegra tried to stand, and as she tipped herself upright, a white-hot wire shot through her arm. Her ears were full of sea sounds; her eyes were full of light. There was a smell like tar. She took a step, pitched forward into the void.
She came to with Corinne speaking. “Are you all right? Can you answer me?” The words passed over like the shadows of birds, and then the darkness spread silently out from those shadows. The next time she awoke, she was in Corinne’s arms.
It was an irresistible way to meet. By the time they got to the hospital they were partners in crime. Sylvia mustn’t be told about the jump, but Allegra was still too faint, too fading in and out, to trust herself on the phone with her mother. “Don’t tell her anything,” Allegra said. She remembered how she’d broken her foot years before, in kindergarten, falling off the monkey bars. She’d spent a night in the hospital and Sylvia had stayed the whole time, sitting by the bed in one of those awful plastic chairs, never closing her eyes. Allegra would have said she was closer to Daniel than to Sylvia—even within the family there was something guarded about Sylvia—but now, with her arm hurting horribly, she wanted her mother. “Make her come.”
She lay on the gurney, her mind drifting over the white swirling contours of the ceiling like snow. Corinne punched her cell phone and then picked up Allegra’s unhurt hand while she talked, stroking it with her thumb. “Mrs. Hunter?” Corinne said. “You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Allegra’s. Allegra is fine. We think her arm is broken, but I’m here at the Vacaville Kaiser with her and she’s going to be fine.” Corinne described, in great detail, an unfortunate chain of events. A friendly dog, a boy with a ball, a pebbly patch of road, Allegra on a bicycle. Sylvia bought it all. These things happened, even when dogs were friendly, even when bike helmets were worn. Allegra had always been so careful to wear her bike helmet. But sometimes it just didn’t matter how careful a person was. She and Daniel would be there as soon as they could. They’d hope to thank Corinne for her kindness in person.
Allegra was impressed. Anyone who could lie as effortlessly as Corinne was someone to keep on the right side of. You would want her lies told for and not to you.
But Corinne turned out not to be the thrill-seeker Allegra assumed. Later, when Allegra mentioned some ideas that might add a touch of adrenaline to their lovemaking, Corinne was unreceptive. She’d been skydiving only as an antidote to writer’s block. She’d hoped to shake something loose. She saw the void as the blank page; she was throwing herself onto it. The skydiving had been a metaphor.
But it hadn’t helped, and she would be a fool to repeat the experiment. “You broke your arm!” she would say, as if Allegra didn’t know this. Corinne kept herself on the ground, at safe speeds, inside her apartment, drinking cups of fretful tea. She was a dental hygienist, but not a passionate one—she’d chosen it because it seemed like a job that would allow her time to write. Really, she lived the most boring life, though Allegra was totally in love with her before she saw this. The only part of Corinne that Allegra had seen clearly in those hours at the hospital when she was flying on painkillers and falling falling falling in love was the lying.
Sylvia had uncorked a nice Petit Syrah, something that went well with cheese and crackers, the rain and the fire. Jocelyn had drunk just enough to feel companionable, not quite enough to feel witty. She was holding up her glass so the firelight came through it. It was a heavy, faceted crystal, a wedding gift once, now unfortunately clouded by thirty-two years of hard water in the dishwasher. If only Sylvia had taken proper care.
“Sense and Sensibility features one of Austen’s favorite characters—the handsome debaucher,” Jocelyn said. “She’s very suspicious of good-looking men, I think. Her heroes tend to be actively nondescript.” Twirling her glass so the ruby-colored wine rose in thin sheets and fell again. Daniel was a nondescript man, though Jocelyn wouldn’t say it and Sylvia would never concede it. Of course, in Austenworld, that was all to his credit.
“Except for Darcy,” Prudie said.
“We haven’t gotten to Darcy yet.” There was a warning in Jocelyn’s voice. Prudie took it no further.
“Her heroes have better hearts than her villains. They’re deserving. Edward is good people,” said Bernadette.
“Well, of course,” in Allegra’s smoothest, most melodious tones. Probably only her mother and Jocelyn would know how impatient such an obvious point made her. Allegra took a gulp of wine so big Jocelyn could hear it going down.
“In real life,” said Grigg, “women want the heel, not the soul.” He spoke with great bitterness, eyelashes pumping. Jocelyn knew a lot of men who believed this. Women don’t want nice men, they cry out over beers, to any woman nice enough to listen. They condemn themselves loudly, lamenting their uncontrollable, damnable niceness. In fact, when you got to know these men better, lots of them weren’t as nice as they believed themselves to be. There was no percentage in pointing this out.
“But Austen’s not entirely unsympathetic to Willoughby in the end,” Bernadette said. “I love that bit where he confesses to Elinor. You can feel Austen softening just the way Elinor does, in spite of herself. She won’t allow that he’s a good person, because he’s not, but she lets you feel for him, just for a moment. She has to balance it on a knife edge—too much and you’ll be wishing him with Marianne after all.”
“Structurally that confession bookends the long story Brandon tells her.” Another writerly observation from Allegra. Corinne might be gone, Jocelyn thought, but her ghost certainly remained, reading Allegra’s books, making Allegra’s points. Perhaps Jocelyn had been too hard on Allegra earlier. She’d neglected to factor in Corinne when calculating the loss of Daniel. Poor darling.
“Poor Elinor! Willoughby on one side, Brandon on the other. She is quite entre deux feux.” Prudie had a bit of lipstick on her teeth, or else it was wine. Jocelyn wanted to lean across and wipe it off with a napkin, the way she did when Sahara needed tidying. But she restrained herself; Prudie didn’t belong to her. The fire sculpted Prudie’s face, left the hollows of her cheeks hollow, brightened her deep-set eyes. She wasn’t pretty like Allegra, but she was attractive in an interesting way. She drew your eye. She would probably age well, like Anjelica Huston. If only she would stop speaking French. Or go to France, where it would be less noticeable.
“And Lucy, too,” Bernadette said. “Something about Elinor. Everyone wants to tell her their secrets. She encourages intimacy without meaning to.”
“Why doesn’t Brandon fall in love with her, I wonder?” Jocelyn asked. Jocelyn would never second-guess Austen, not in a million years, but that was the match she would have tried to make. “They’re perfect for each other.”
“No, he needs Marianne’s animation,” said Allegra. “Because he has none of his own.”
Corinne craved confession. Where Allegra wished to be teasingly intimidated before lovemaking, Corinne wished to be soothed with secrets afterward. “I want to know everything about you,” she said, which was just what a lover should say, and roused no suspicions. “Especially the things you’ve never told anyone.”
“Once I say them, they’ll change,” Allegra protested. “They won’t be secrets anymore.”
“No,” said Corinne. “They’ll be our secrets. Trust me.”
So Allegra told her:
1. There was a special class at my grammar school. A class for retarded children. Sometimes we saw them, but mostly they were kept away. They had a different recess, a different lunchtime. Maybe they only came for half the day.
One of these children was a boy named Billy. He carried a basketball wherever he went, and he sometimes talked to it. Nonsense, gibberish. I used to think that he was only aping human conversation, that he didn’t understand it involved actual words and people who talked back. He wore a hat, squashed down on his head, which made his ears stick out like Dopey in Snow White. His nose ran a lot. It made me unhappy to think about him, or about any of them. Mostly I didn’t.
One day I saw him at the edge of the playground, where he wasn’t supposed to be. I thought he’d get in trouble if anyone else saw him. The teacher for the special class always seemed to be shouting at someone. So I went up to him, congratulating myself the whole time on how caring I was, how I could talk to Billy just as if he were a real boy. But when I got close I saw he had his penis in his hand. He showed it to me, laid it flat along his palm for me to look at. It twitched there, like it was being poked with pins. I went back to my friends.
A few weeks later, there was a day when my father picked me up after class. He was distracted by something; I felt ignored. So I told him how there was this boy at school who’d made me look at his penis. An older boy. Daddy was more upset than I’d bargained for; right away I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. He demanded the boy’s name, stopped to look the family up in the phone book at the drugstore, drove over to their house, banged on the front door. A woman came. She had braids like a child, but gray hair; it struck me as odd. She wore those winged glasses. Daddy started to talk and she started to cry. But angrily at first. “None of you give a damn about us,” she said. I wasn’t used to people swearing, so I was shocked. And then she wasn’t angry anymore; it was more like despair. “What do you expect me to do?”
“I expect you to talk to your boy—” Daddy was saying, when Billy appeared behind her, holding his stupid ball and muttering. Daddy stopped mid-sentence.
Daddy had a younger brother who was retarded. He died when he was fifteen, hit by a car. I’ve always been afraid that I wouldn’t love a child unless it was beautiful. I’ve always been afraid to have children because of that. But Daddy says his mother loved her retarded child best. She always said that a mother’s love goes where it’s needed.
After his brother died, Daddy tried to get his mother to go out more. He and Mom tried to take Grandma to movies and concerts and plays. But she usually said no. He would drop by to see how she was doing, and she’d be sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window. “I can’t think of a blessed thing I want to do anymore,” she’d say.
So Billy was standing behind his mother, talking to his basketball with more and more agitation in his voice. Daddy was apologizing, but Billy’s mom was having none of it. “What do you know?” she asked. “With your pretty little girl going off to college one day. Marrying. Having more pretty children for you.”
We got back in the car and drove home. Daddy said, “I wouldn’t have added to that woman’s troubles for anything in the world.” He said, “You must have known there was an important part of the story you were leaving out.” He said, “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have handled things very differently.” “Go to your room,” he said. I hadn’t known I could make him that angry. I was afraid he’d stopped loving me. He wouldn’t take my hand. He wouldn’t look at me.
I couldn’t defend myself, even to myself. I tried. I thought about how I’d had no idea he would get so upset, no idea she would get so upset. I didn’t know there would be tears. I wouldn’t have said a word if I’d known. But why had I said a word? I’d just been idly angling for attention. I hadn’t told Daddy that Billy was retarded, because I knew I’d get more attention doing it the other way. I hadn’t even minded when Billy showed me his penis. It seemed kind of friendly.
2. One time we went to a museum where there were paintings by van Gogh. I liked how thick they were. Daddy said that artists paint the way they actually see, or maybe he said something else, but I heard it that way. I thought about van Gogh looking out from his eyes at a world thick like that. I’d never wondered if I saw the world the way everyone else did or if I saw something better or wrong or different. How would you know? How would van Gogh say, Does everything look sort of thick to you? He wouldn’t even think to say it.
The next day I lay out on the grass in our backyard and I looked straight into the sun, the way my mother had told me never to do because it would damage my eyes. I thought that I would grow up to be a famous artist and everything and everyone I saw, everything and everyone I painted, would be blinding to look at.
3. My parents believed children should have lots of free time. They believed in dreaming. I had piano lessons briefly, but they didn’t take, and I didn’t do after-school sports or anything until I was in high school. I read a lot and I made things. I looked for four-leaf clovers. I watched ant colonies. Ants have very little unscheduled time. Places to go, people to see. I adopted a particular nest, out by a stepping-stone in Mom’s mission garden. I was very good to my ants at first. I brought them bits of cookies with sprinkles; I landscaped with shells and thought how I’d like to find a shell so big I could climb inside, go exploring.
I made tiny newspapers of ant events, stamp-sized papers at first, then a bit bigger, too big for ants, it distressed me, but I couldn’t fit the stories otherwise and I wanted real stories, not just lines of something that looked like writing. Anyway, imagine how small an ant paper would really be. Even a stamp would have been like a basketball court.
I imagined political upheavals, plots and coups d’état, and I reported on them. I think I may have been reading a biography of Mary Queen of Scots at the time. Did you read those orange biographies as a child? The ones all about the childhoods of famous people, and the last chapter would be the accomplishments that made them famous? God, I loved those books. I remember Ben Franklin and Clara Barton and Will Rogers and Jim Thorpe and Amelia Earhart and Madame Curie, and one about the first white child born in the Roanoke colony—Virginia Dare?—but I guess that must have all been made up.
Anyway, there was this short news day for the ants. I’d run out of political plots, or I was bored with them. So I got a glass of water and I created a flood. The ants scrambled for safety, swimming for their lives. I was kind of ashamed, but it made good copy. I told myself I was bringing excitement into their usual humdrum. The next day, I dropped a rock on them. It was a meteorite from outer space. They gathered around it and ran up and over it; obviously they didn’t know what to do. It prompted three letters to the editor. Eventually I torched them. I was always way too interested in matches. Things got a little out of hand and the fire spread from the anthill into the garden. Only a little, not as bad as that sounds. Diego came and stamped it out, and I remember crying and trying to get him to stop, because he was stepping on my ants.
But what a horrible, heartless queen I turned out to be. I will never seek the presidency.
4. There was this boy I fucked when I was twenty-two, just because he wanted it so much. He was a student from Galway, and we met in Rome and traveled together for three weeks. On our last night together, the night before I had to go home, we were in Prague. We went to dinner and then out to the bars, and I drank until I was wetly sentimental, and demanded an exchange of tokens. He gave me a photograph of him holding a cat. I forced my silver ring onto his finger. It caught at the knuckle, but I pushed it down.
He said how touched he was. He swore he’d never take it off, and then he tried to take it off and he couldn’t. His finger began to swell and turn odd colors. We went to the restroom of the pub and tried to soap it loose, but it was too late, the finger far too swollen. We asked for butter and got it, but that didn’t work either. His face was now turning an odd color as well, sort of a fishy white. You know how pale the Irish are; they never go outdoors there. We went back to the hostel and I tried to take his mind off it by fucking him, but this was only a temporary diversion. His finger was round as a sausage and he couldn’t bend it anymore.
So we went looking for a taxi to take us to a hospital. By now it was about three in the morning; the streets were dark, cold, and silent. We walked several blocks, and he was actually starting to whine, like a dog. When we did finally find a ride, the driver spoke no English. I made siren sounds and pointed, again and again, to the finger. I pantomimed a stethoscope. When you picture this, you have to picture me very drunk. I don’t know what the driver thought initially, but he did get it at last, and then the hospital turned out to be less than a block away. He coasted forward and let us out. He was saying something as he drove off. We couldn’t understand it, but we could guess.
The hospital was closed, but there was an intercom and we spoke on it to someone else who didn’t speak English. He begged us to be intelligible and then gave up and buzzed us in. All the hallways were dark, and we walked down several until we saw some lights in a waiting room. I used to have dreams like that, dark hallways, echoing footsteps. Labyrinths that twisted and circled, with the directions printed on the walls in some alien alphabet. I mean I had the dreams before this happened, and I still have them sometimes: I’m lost in a foreign city; people talk, but I can’t understand them.
So we followed the light and found a doctor, and he spoke English, which was a bit of luck, really. We explained about the ring and he stared at us. “You’re in internal medicine,” he said. “I’m a heart surgeon.” I was prepared to go back to the hostel rather than put up with such embarrassment, but then it wasn’t my finger. (Though it was my ring.) But Conor—that was his name—was not leaving.
“It hurts more than I can say,” he said. Which is sort of a koan, if you think about it. Anyway, I was thinking about it.
“You’re drunk, yes?” the doctor asked. He took Conor away and removed the ring, screwing it off by force. Apparently this was astonishingly painful, but I slept through it in the waiting room.
Afterward I asked Conor where the ring was. He’d left it in the doctor’s office. I pictured it lying in one of those blue kidney-shaped dishes. Conor said it had been badly dented in the removal, but I’d made it myself, so I was the tiniest bit hurt that he’d forgotten it. I would have gone back for it if the doctor hadn’t been so cross. “I wanted you to have it as a keepsake,” I told Conor.
“I guess I’ll remember you, all right,” he said.
The phone rang in the kitchen and Allegra went to answer it. Daniel was on the other end. “How’s your mom doing, sweet-pea?” he asked.
“Bueno. She’s lovely. We’re having a party. Ask her yourself,” Allegra said. She put the phone down and went back into the living room. “It’s Dad,” she told Sylvia. “It’s a guilt call.”
Sylvia went to the phone, carrying her wine. “Hello, Daniel.” She turned off the kitchen light and sat in the dark, her glass in one hand and the phone in the other. The rain was loud; one of the gutters on the roof emptied right outside the kitchen.
“She’ll hardly speak to me,” he said.
Sylvia hoped she wasn’t being asked to intercede. That would be too much. But she knew how Daniel loved Allegra; she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, order herself as she would to stop. The refrigerator gave one of its funny rattles; the familiarity, the hominess of the sound nearly undid her. She pressed her glass against her face. A moment passed before she could trust herself to speak. “Give her time.”
“I have someone coming on Saturday to look at the upstairs shower. You needn’t be there, I’ll come and deal with it. I’m just giving you fair warning. You and Allegra. In case you don’t want to see me.”
“It’s not your house anymore.”
“Yes, it is. I’m leaving the marriage, I’m not leaving you. As long as you’re in the house, I’ll take care of the house.”
“Fuck off,” said Sylvia.
There was a burst of laughter from the living room. “I’ll let you get back to your guests,” Daniel said. “I’ll be there between ten and twelve Saturday. Go to the farmer’s market, buy those pistachios you like so much. You won’t even know I’ve been by, except that the shower will be fixed.”
Corinne joined a writing group that met once a week. She hoped it would function as a kind of deadline, forcing her to work. She did seem to be spending more time at the computer, and occasionally, Allegra heard the keys. Corinne’s mood had improved, and she talked a lot at dinner now about point of view and pacing and deep structure. All very abstract.
The writing group met at a Quaker meeting hall, and initially there’d been some question, the Quakers being so kind as to allow the use of their space without remuneration, whether the group shouldn’t honor Quaker principles in the work they brought there. Was it right to accept this gift and then share work with violent or unwholesome themes? The group decided, after much discussion, that a work might need to be violent in order to espouse nonviolence effectively. They were writers. They, of all people, must resist censorship in whatever guise. The Quakers would expect no less of them.
The other writers in the group became important to Corinne, so much so that Allegra minded that she was evidently never to meet them. She heard about them, but only in abridged versions. The critique circle was built on trust; there was an expectation of confidentiality, Corinne said.
Corinne was not good at keeping secrets. Allegra heard that one woman had brought in a poem on abortion, written in red ink to represent blood. One man was doing a sort of French bedroom farce, only without any actual humor to it, and the text messily annotated with arrows and cross-outs, so it was no pleasure to read; yet week after week he reliably turned in another plodding chapter of cocks and cuckoldings. Another woman was writing a fantasy novel, and it had a good plot, ticked right along, except everyone in it had amber eyes, or emerald or amethyst or sapphire. Nothing the other members said could persuade her to substitute brown or blue or not mention the goddamn eyes at all.
One evening Corinne said casually over dinner that she was going out that night to a poetry reading. Lynne, from her writing group, was reading an erotic set at Good Vibrations, the sex-toy store. “I’ll go with you,” Allegra said. Surely Corinne didn’t expect her to stay home while racy poetry was being read aloud in a landscape of whips and dildos.
“I don’t want you making fun of anyone.” Corinne was obviously very uncomfortable. “You can really be severe when you think someone has no taste. We’re all just novices in the group. If I hear you make fun of Lynne, I’ll know that I’m probably ridiculous, too. I can’t write if I think I’m being ridiculous.”
“I would never think you’re ridiculous,” Allegra protested. “I couldn’t. And I love poetry. You know that.”
“You love your sort of poetry,” Corinne said. “Poems about trees. That’s not what Lynne will be reading.” Corinne never actually said that Allegra could go, but Allegra did, since she was now anxious to prove that she could behave, in addition to getting some glimpse of Corinne’s other life. Corinne’s real life, as she sometimes thought. The life she wasn’t to be any part of.
Good Vibrations had set up fifty chairs, of which seven were taken. Inflatable crotches hung on the walls behind the podium in various stages of openness, like butterflies. There were cabinets in which corsets and strap-ons had been scattered together. Lynne was charmingly nervous. She read, but she also talked about the issues, personal and artistic, that her poetry raised for her. She’d just finished a piece in which a woman’s breast spoke in several stanzas about its past admirers. The poem had a formal structure, and Lynne confessed that she wondered whether this was really the way to go. She begged her audience to regard it as a work in progress.
Even the breast spoke in a poetry-reading voice, with that lilt at the end of each line, like Pound or Eliot or whoever it was who had started the unfortunate custom. The audience clapped at the hot parts, and Allegra was careful to clap, too, although what she found hot was apparently different from what others found hot. Afterward she went with Corinne to congratulate Lynne. She said how much she’d enjoyed the evening, as blameless a statement as anyone could make, but Corinne shot her a sharp look. She could see that her presence was making Corinne unhappy. She had forced her way in, when she’d known Corinne didn’t want her. Allegra excused herself to use the bathroom. She took her time, washing her face, combing her hair, and all on purpose so that Corinne could talk to Lynne without Allegra there to hear.
That weekend Sylvia and Jocelyn came down for a dog show at the Cow Palace and Allegra met them for lunch. Corinne had been invited, but the words were suddenly flowing, she’d said, she couldn’t risk stopping. Jocelyn was in a very good mood. Thembe had taken Best of Breed, the judge noting his great reach and drive, as well as his beautiful topline. He would compete in Hounds in the afternoon. Plus, Jocelyn had in her pockets the cards of several promising studs. The future looked bright. The Cow Palace was thunderous and odorous. They took their lunches to the picnic tables so as not to eat in front of the dogs.
It was a great relief to Allegra to be able finally to tell someone about the poetry reading. She remembered particularly choice lines; Sylvia laughed so hard she spit her sandwich into her lap. Afterward Allegra was contrite. “I wish Corinne would let me in a bit,” she said. “She’s afraid to be laughed at. As if I’d laugh at her.”
“I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem,” Jocelyn said. “ ‘Your twin eyes.’ Don’t most people have twin eyes? All but an unfortunate few? You think it shouldn’t matter. You think how nice the sentiment is and how much work went into it. But the next time he goes to kiss you, all you can think is ‘Your twin eyes.’ ”
“I’m sure Corinne’s a wonderful writer,” Sylvia said. “Isn’t she?”
And Allegra said yes! She was! Wonderful! In fact, Corinne had yet to show Allegra a word. The books she liked to read were all really good books, though.
“The thing is,” said Allegra, and in Jocelyn’s experience, good things rarely followed those words, “if she had to choose between writing and me, I know she’d choose writing. Should I mind that? I shouldn’t mind that. I’m just sort of an all-out person, myself.”
“The thing is,” Sylvia answered, “she doesn’t have to choose. So you never have to really know.”
When Allegra got home, much to her surprise, she met Lynne just leaving the apartment. They stopped for a moment on the step to exchange pleasantries. Allegra had walked several blocks uphill from the only parking place she’d been able to find—she might as well have left the car in Daly City—and was hot, cross, and out of breath. But she managed to say again how much she’d enjoyed Lynne’s poetry. This wasn’t a lie. She had thoroughly enjoyed it. “I brought some cookies by to thank you both for coming,” Lynne said. “I was so happy to find Corinne working. She’s such a talent.”
Allegra felt the bite of jealousy because Lynne had seen Corinne’s work. Even the woman who wrote abortion poems in red ink had seen Corinne’s work. “Wonderful stories,” Lynne said, hitting the first syllable of “wonderful” like a gong. “Her piece about the retarded boy? ‘Billy’s Ball’? Like Tom Hanks in that castaway thing, only genuinely moving.”
“Corinne wrote a story about a retarded boy?” Allegra asked. And she hadn’t even changed his name? Corinne wouldn’t do such a thing. Our secrets. Trust me.
Lynne covered her mouth with her hand, smiling through her fingers. “Oh! Everything that happens in critique is absolutely classified. I so shouldn’t have said that. Of course, I thought she’d have shown you. You have to promise you won’t tell. Please don’t tell on me.” She persisted with such a distasteful, flirty girlishness that Allegra made the promise just to make it stop.
Allegra went inside, walked into the study, where Corinne was still working at the computer, and watched her hit Sleep, the words disappearing from the screen in the time it took Allegra to cross the room. “No more writer’s block?” she asked. One touch on any key would bring the words back.
“No,” said Corinne. “The muse has returned to me.”
That night Corinne asked for a story even though they hadn’t made love. Allegra propped herself up on the pillow and looked at her. She had her eyes closed, an ear poking through the hair on one side of her head. Her chin tilted upward, her neck a snowy slope. Her nipples visible through her tank top. Seductive innocence.
Allegra said:
5. There was this girl I knew in high school who got pregnant. I liked her when I first met her, and I felt sorry for her when she got pregnant—you should have heard the things boys said about her. But by then I didn’t really like her much anymore. There’s a whole middle to the story, but I’m too tired to tell it.
Allegra had gotten drunk. She didn’t think she was the only one. She could see that Prudie had flushed cheeks and glassy eyes. The Petit Syrah had disappeared like magic, and Jocelyn had sent her to the kitchen for a bottle of Graffigna Malbec and to see how Sylvia was doing since she had never come back after Daniel’s phone call. When Allegra stood up, she knew she was drunk.
Sylvia was sitting in the dark kitchen with the phone back in its cradle. “Hey, darling,” she said, and her voice was fine.
There was no need for such a charade, especially in front of Allegra. “How do you take it so calmly?” she asked. “You hardly seem to care.” She knew she was out of line. She could hear her drunk, out-of-line voice coming out of her mouth.
“I care.”
“You don’t have to hide it. No one out there will think any worse of you if you throw a glass or scream or go to bed or tell them all to get the fuck out.”
“You’ll have to let me be who I am, dear,” Sylvia said. “Do you know where we were when Daniel told me he wanted a divorce? He’d taken me out to dinner. To Biba’s. I’d always wanted to go to Biba’s, but we’d never been able to get in. So that’s what just occurred to me. That he had to make a reservation way in advance and then pretend for weeks that everything was okay. Such a thoughtful way to dump your wife.”
“I’m sure he wasn’t planning the evening like that! I’m sure he didn’t know what he’d say or when he’d say it. Some people do things without planning them all through like you.”
“You’re probably right. A person’s no more sane falling out of love than falling into it, I guess. Thank God it’s raining. We didn’t get enough rain this year.”
Sylvia’s face was dimly reflected in the kitchen window. Allegra thought how she was seeing both sides of her face at once. Her mother had been such a pretty woman, but after holding her own for quite some time, she’d aged all of a sudden a few years back. You could see how the aging would go on now; you could see where the hammer would hit next.
Allegra knelt unsteadily and put her head into her mother’s lap. She felt her mother’s hands combing through her hair. “What do we know about it, you and I?” Allegra asked. “We’re not the sort who fall out of love, are we?”
Allegra got up when she was sure Corinne was sleeping, and went into the study. She emptied the wastebasket onto the floor. There wasn’t much, and what there was had been torn into tiny, despairing bits, none looking as if they’d come from Corinne’s printer. Allegra found the word “Zyzzyva” embossed on one piece. She persisted, sorting by color, until she had three piles. She was wearing nothing but the knee-length T-shirt she slept in, so she dragged a blanket out of the linen closet and lay on the floor, swaddled, piecing bits of paper together.
“We must regretfully pass on the story you’ve sent us,” she read at last. “ ‘Billy’s Ball’ has much to recommend it, and although it didn’t seem exactly right for us, we would be willing to see other work from you in the future. Good luck with your endeavors, the Editors.”
Fifteen minutes later: “We are returning your story ‘Good-bye, Prague’ to you as we are only interested in lesbian material. We highly suggest you familiarize yourself with our magazine. A subscription form is enclosed. Thank you, the Editors.”
Ten minutes later: A form rejection—“does not suit our purposes at this time”—but someone had penned a single sentence across the bottom in ballpoint ink: “Who among us has not tormented ants?”
Allegra swept the pieces up, mixed them back together, dumped them into the wastebasket. She felt as if she’d been stripped and then strip-mined. So Corinne’s desire to keep her away from her writing friends had nothing to do with Allegra’s sarcastic tongue. How unkind of Corinne to make her feel that she was the one at fault.
Of course, this small unkindness was nothing compared with the betrayal of trust. It had begun to rain, but Allegra didn’t know that until she went outside. She hardly felt it even then, though she was wearing only her T-shirt. She walked three blocks to her car, drove two hours to her parents’ house—longer than usual, because she’d forgotten to bring money for the bridge toll (forgotten even her driver’s license) and she had to pull over to the side, get out undressed as she was, to talk about this. Eventually she was waved through, such was the persuasive power of crying uncontrollably when you were practically naked.
It was after three in the morning when she arrived home, soaking wet. Her father made her a cup of hot milk; her mother put her straight to bed. For three days, she got up only to go to the bathroom. Corinne phoned several times, but Allegra refused to speak to her.
How dare Corinne write up Allegra’s secret stories and send them off to magazines to be published?
How dare Corinne write them so poorly that no one wished to take them?
It wasn’t Jane Austen’s fault that love went bad. You couldn’t even say she didn’t warn you. Her heroines made out well enough, but there were always other characters in the book who didn’t finish happily—Brandon’s Eliza in Sense and Sensibility; in Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas, Lydia Bennet; in Mansfield Park, Maria Bertram. These were the women to whom you should be paying attention, but you weren’t.
Allegra was trying very hard not to express any of Corinne’s opinions, but every time she spoke, Corinne’s words came out. Corinne was in no mood to praise a writer like Austen, who wrote so much about love when the world was full of other things. “Everything in Austen is on the surface,” Allegra said. “She’s not a writer who uses images. Image is the way to bring the unsaid into the text. With Austen, everything is said.”
Prudie shook her head vigorously; her hair flew about her cheeks. “Half of what Jane says is said ironically. Irony is a way of saying two things at once.” Prudie was trying to express something she hadn’t completely worked out yet. She opened her hands, like two halves of a book, clapped them closed. Allegra was mystified by the gesture, but she could see that whatever Prudie was trying to say, it was something she deeply believed. “The thing you’ve said and that opposite thing you’ve said at the same time,” she cried out. She had the carefully constructed dignity of someone drunk. Prudie’s dignity always felt slightly manufactured, so the difference was a subtle one. A tiny slur, a bit of spit.
“Yes, of course.” Of course, Bernadette had no more idea what Prudie was going on about than Allegra did. She was just choosing agreement because it seemed more polite than opposition, even when one had no idea what point was being made. “And I think it’s her humor that keeps us reading her two centuries later. At least, that’s what I respond most to. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Tell me if I’m alone in this.”
“People like a romance,” Grigg said. “Women do, anyway. I mean, I do, too. I didn’t mean that I didn’t.”
Sylvia came back into the room. She stirred the fire so that it threw off sparks, spinning like pinwheels up the flue. She added another log, crushing the life out of what little flame had remained. “Brandon and Marianne,” she said. “At the end, doesn’t it feel just as if Marianne’s been sold? Her mother and Elinor, both pushing so hard. It reads as if she fell in love with Brandon, but only after she married him. He’s been such a good man that her mother and Elinor are determined he’ll get his reward.”
“But that’s my point,” Prudie said. “Jane intends you to feel that uncomfortableness. The book ends with that marriage and the thing Austen isn’t saying about it.”
Sylvia sat down next to Allegra, which forced Grigg to move aside. “It just makes me sad. Marianne can be self-centered and all, but who really wants her sobered up, settled down? Nobody. Nobody could ever want to see her be anything but exactly what she is.”
“Do you want her with Willoughby, then?” Allegra asked.
“Don’t you?” said Sylvia. She leaned forward to address Prudie. “I think you should let Jocelyn drive you home tonight. Don’t worry about your car. Daniel will bring it round in the morning.” There was a silence. Sylvia put her hand over her mouth.
“I’ll do that,” said Allegra. “I’ll bring you your car.”
When Allegra finally rose from her bed, only three days after she’d fled her apartment in nothing but her T-shirt, she drove to the Vacaville skydiving school. At first she was told that no one would take her. She had no appointment; she knew the rules. And if she was back because of the broken arm, they weren’t responsible for that; there were certain forms she might remember having signed. She needed to go home and think it through, they said. She needed to make an appointment and come back after she’d thought more about it.
Allegra argued. She laughed a lot, so that no one would get the wrong idea about her mood and intentions. She flirted. She let the men flirt back. She told them that this was a skydiving emergency, and finally, Marco, who’d been one of her instructors and was apparently still unclear on her sexuality—not that she hadn’t told him often enough, but her behavior today had obviously raised the question again—agreed to be her tandem master. Tandem was not what she wanted; she was definitely in the mood for solo, but solo wasn’t happening.
Allegra put on the ridiculous orange suit and they went up. Marco clipped himself to the back of her shoulders and hips. “Are you ready?” he asked, and before she could answer, he’d pushed her out. There was a smiley-face sticker inside the plane, just where you put your hand before you jumped. The words “Go Big” were written in marker beneath.
They slid through the air. The wind was rough, Marco close. But she got what she wanted. Blue sky above, brown hills below. Behind her, the university stretching out its vast agricultural fields of unnatural tomatoes, burrowing owls, dairy cows. Somewhere to the east, her parents were having lunch. Her parents, who loved her. Marco pulled the cord, and she heard the parachute spinning out, felt it catching. Her parents who loved her and her brothers and her nieces and each other, and they always would.
Dear Miss Austen:
We must regretfully inform you that your work does not suit our current needs.
In 1797, Jane Austen’s father sent First Impressions to a publisher in London named Thomas Cadell. “As I am well aware of what consequence it is that a work of this sort should make its first Appearance under a respectable name I apply to you,” he wrote. He asked what it would cost to publish “at the Author’s risk,” and what advance might be offered if the manuscript were liked. He was prepared to pay himself, if necessary.
The package came back immediately, with “Declined by Return of Post” written across the top.
The book was published sixteen years later. Its title had been changed to Pride and Prejudice.
In 1803, a London publisher named Richard Crosby bought a novel (later titled Northanger Abbey) from Jane Austen for ten pounds. He advertised it in a brochure, but never published it. Six years passed. Austen then wrote to Crosby, offering to replace the manuscript, if it had been lost and if Crosby intended to publish it quickly. Otherwise, she said, she would go to another publisher.
Crosby wrote back, denying that he was under any obligation to publish the book. He would return it to her, he said, only if she returned his ten pounds. Northanger Abbey was not published until five months after Austen’s death.
Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.
MARK TWAIN
I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. . . . All that interests in any character [is]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? . . . Suicide is more respectable.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON