I wrote the Jane Austen piece first and called it “Jane Austen at Midnight.” Midnight is literal in that case. Jane Austen alone in her room with her candle dripping. Soon to sputter out and leave her in the dark.
But then, as I sat to write the others, that very word, Midnight, the toll of it, came to mean more than an hour on the clock.
It was, rather, the time of reckoning, the moment when one’s life stands stark before one’s eyes. Sometimes there is a choice, as with Austen and Joan of Arc; sometimes there is simply one’s fate, as with Mary Shelley, and the test becomes how one meets it. That time is always midnight, even if the sun is high in the sky.