The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner Page 0,84
hung up and hit the wall with her slender right hand balled into a little fist. She half expected Yardley, sleeping next door, to smack the wall back at her, but there was no responding sound. Everyone else in the house was surely fast asleep by now. It had been a long day.
She went over to the row of windows that looked out onto the expansive front drive and the adjoining woodland and fields of pasture beyond. The outside world, so dark and mysterious, shimmered in a moonlit haze. She was furious at the other world, the one back home, the much more sadly predictable one where Monte could assault her and then end up in bed with Jack all the same, and no one would ever say a word, would ever say anything that might lose them money and—most important of all—power. Because power was everything—you could get nothing done without it. The longer she stayed away from Hollywood, and the less negotiating power she had, the more she wondered if she might not be better off simply torching it all rather than enduring a slow but inevitable decline.
Jane Austen knew about money and power, too, Mimi reminded herself, in the specialness of her surroundings that night. Austen saw what lack of money meant for the women in her life, and this consuming fear was what was telegraphed most loudly in all her books, hidden behind the much more palatable workings of the marriage plot. Austen knew that no amount of charity or largesse from their male relatives could ever grant women real independence. Yet, through her genius—a genius that no amount of money or power could buy because it was all inside her head, completely her own—she had accrued some small degree of autonomy by the end. Enough to work, live, and die on her own terms. It really was a most remarkable achievement, the legacy of those six books, revised and spurred on and cast solely by her own two hands, with no man with inevitably more power or money getting in the way.
Mimi realized that this was not altogether true—that perhaps Austen’s life might have turned out differently, the canon might have been even more expansive, if some of the men in her family and in the world of publishing had made different decisions on her behalf. But all Mimi knew, standing there in the moonlight, a pawn between two moneymen without an original thought between them, was how much more satisfying and safe it was to be a creator of something that doesn’t end with age, but only gets better. She accepted that this was her own Faustian bargain, going to Hollywood and forsaking the stage, where the crow’s-feet and grey hairs weren’t visible past the first few rows of the house. She had gotten rich and famous at an unheard-of clip, spurred on by her beauty and the fantasizing that it generated. And, she suspected, she would lose it all just as fast.
She was about to turn from the window and climb back into bed when she thought she saw someone far off in the distance emerging from the woods. The little shepherd’s hut stood on its wheels in the centre of the lime grove, awash in moonlight, and as she opened one of the windows slightly, she thought she could hear something, the shutting of a latch, the footfall of boots on a creaky wooden stepladder. It was probably just her imagination, which was almost as active as Evie’s. But as Mimi climbed back into bed and dozed off just past midnight, her half-dreaming thoughts were a strange permutation of the eight members of the society into various couplings: Evie and Adam, Adam and Adeline, Dr. Gray and Frances, Frances and Andrew …
* * *
Evie sat alone in the library. It was late and the rest of the Great House had long since gone to bed, but she found she could still function just fine on four hours of sleep, so she continued to complete her work in the smallest hours of the morning.
The catalogue was now complete. In a frenzy she had worked through the final volumes the past few weeks and had, after two years, recorded everything of note about each and every book on the shelves. Two thousand three hundred and seventy-five books to be exact. She had written down publication dates and edition numbers, then described in minute detail the binding and spine labels, the presence of any identifying