The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner Page 0,31

as anything she had ever touched. This was Evie’s absolute favourite of all of Austen’s books, and of all the books she had read so far in her young life. For this, too, she had Adeline Lewis to thank.

Right from the start Miss Lewis had noticed what she called Evie’s “intellectual precociousness,” and the very first book she had pressed into the girl’s hands was her own well-worn copy of Pride and Prejudice. As Adeline suspected, Evie had quickly picked up on the subtle and ironic humour in the text. The young girl had particularly loved moments such as Mr. Bennet’s asking Mrs. Bennet—after her one-sided litany on which of their five daughters the wealthy new neighbour, Mr. Bingley, might marry—if she supposed that to be Bingley’s “design” in moving there. Mrs. Bennet rudely scoffs, “Design? Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them.…” To the delight of Evie, everything about Mrs. Bennet’s obtuseness and desperate one-track mind could be thoroughly and efficiently summed up in that one throwaway line.

But no sooner had Miss Lewis started at the school than the visits from a myriad of different, sheepish, male school board trustees had begun. Evie had watched with fascination as Miss Lewis held her ground with each of them, reinforced the value of her lesson plans, and practically dared the men to do something about it. One by one the men would leave the classroom visibly disturbed by their exchanges with her—even Dr. Gray seemed unable to manage Adeline Lewis, despite his usual calm but insistent bedside manner. When the students learned of Miss Lewis’s engagement to her childhood sweetheart, they suspected that she would not stay their teacher for long. Evie herself left school for good in the spring of 1944—a year later she learned that Miss Lewis had resigned from teaching, only to lose her new husband in battle, leaving her pregnant, unemployed, and alone.

Meanwhile, Evie, confident in her high impression of Miss Lewis’s flawless literary judgment and her own untested gifts, had spent the past year and a half ploughing through the list of classics that Adeline had given her on her last day at school, a very different list from the one she had given Evie’s father during his long convalescence from that terrible tractor accident. Even without a clear sense of where further study could lead her, Evie was keeping up her reading in the hope that one day a grand opportunity would present itself. She was convinced that she only had to work hard in the meantime and be ready for it when it came.

Then one day Evie read a piece on Virginia Woolf in a copy of The Times Literary Supplement left by the fire for kindling, and it quoted Woolf as saying that Jane Austen was the hardest of all great writers to catch in the act of greatness. For Evie, working for the Knight family, although on the decline, was bringing her one step closer to that greatness. Miss Lewis had said as much to her one day in the village, when she learned where the young girl would be working. Evie continued to console herself over the early departure from school by thinking about her unique proximity to the very environment that had helped inform some of the greatest novels ever written.

This was when the idea of trying to get even closer to the Austen legacy had first popped into Evie’s head.

As she had learned from Miss Lewis in school, Austen’s father had enjoyed a library of hundreds of books in their parsonage home in the village of Steventon, and young Jane had been encouraged to read anything and everything she found on its shelves. Miss Lewis similarly believed that there was no such thing as a “bad” book in terms of content: her mantra to both the class and the trustees was that if something had ever happened before in real life, then it was completely fair game to put it down in print. In fact, it was demanded of it. Miss Lewis was convinced that young Jane’s being allowed to run rampant among fairly “adult” material had informed her gift for irony at an ideal age, giving her years of juvenile writing to perfect it.

Evie knew that the Knight family library, as it stood today, must also contain books that Austen would have borrowed, and the more time that Evie spent both overtly dusting and