The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner Page 0,79
lessons he had been forced to learn so far in life.
When he first started reading Jane Austen, Adam had immediately identified with Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. He had worried about Darcy, about how he could be in such obvious lust with the heroine Elizabeth Bennet and yet make such bewildering social missteps instead—missteps that Adam himself could relate to, despite not being an educated man of property, wealth, and high rank.
Darcy just couldn’t help himself, that much was clear to Adam—even if it wasn’t clear to Darcy. The character would spend over one hundred pages rationalizing all sorts of behaviour and reactions, grabbing on to straws, projecting onto Bingley the undesirability of marrying into the Bennet family, and rupturing his best friend’s budding romance with the heroine’s sister—all the while not understanding his own reasons for acting like this. To Adam’s mind, Darcy fancied himself an appointed puppet master, pulling others’ strings—the strings of those less able than him in some way, dependent on his intellect and judgment and financial largesse. For the first half of the book at least, Darcy seemed to be using Bingley as a strange sort of proxy for himself—trying to enact through Bingley and Jane’s break-up the extinction of his own feelings for Elizabeth.
Adam had slowly realized, the more he read, that he had made his social self a strange, sad proxy for his true self, too. It was as if he had decided early on to not process certain unspoken attractions, but to retreat instead, and his social person lived one sort of life while his inner self remained closed off even from himself. Now he was nearing forty-six years of age, and his mother was not well. One day soon she, too, would be gone, and he would live all alone in that empty house until he might as well be gone, too.
Looking about the room, he finally understood that he had hatched the idea of the Jane Austen Society in part because of his loneliness. He had no essential family ties tethering him to any kind of legacy, no one that would miss a thing about him when he was dead. He was wrong about that, of course, as lonely people often are; everyone in the village had grown to rely on him for small chores about their properties, as well as the pleasant and reliable rumbling sound of his wagon heralding the changing of the seasons. The tip of his cap at the doors to the library. The cradling of a new puppy in his arms. The little hand-carved wooden rattles left on the doorstep whenever a baby was born.
He felt gratified, sitting there in Dr. Gray’s drawing room, that the society was finally taking shape. But he also felt apart from everyone except Evie, whose family circumstances and thirst for learning seemed to equal his own.
And he remained dumbstruck at the vision of Mimi Harrison, who, upon their introduction on the steps of Dr. Gray’s house, had immediately reminded Adam of their first time meeting over a dozen years ago. He considered it a strange twist of fate, how that one encounter in the parish churchyard had led them both here.
He was also relieved to see that Adeline Grover finally had a bit of her colour back—perhaps even too much of it. She was keeping herself busy taking notes of the meeting. Dr. Gray now sat across from her (having moved at some point in a fluster of papers and pens and teacups and chairs), with Andrew Forrester on one side of him and Miss Frances on the other. All three of them as children had been two years ahead of Adam in the little village school, Mr. Knight having been too cheap to arrange for his only daughter’s education at home. Andrew and Dr. Gray had been friendly rivals back then, and at one point were rumoured to have formed a little love triangle with Miss Frances, but Dr. Gray had never stood a chance against Andrew Forrester as far as Adam could tell. Miss Frances had been a noted beauty as a young woman, with her pale grey cat’s eyes and long golden tresses kept half up and half loose about her neck, but over time everything had started a slow fade, until the eyes were now pale to the point of haunting, and the hair was greying and kept in a tight bun high up on the back of her head.