The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner Page 0,85
seals, inscriptions, or book plates, the condition of the boards, the presence and number of any illustrations or engravings or marginalia, the gilding of the pages.
Last fall she had started going to the Alton library on her days off and researching all the information that might be pertinent to her near-complete catalogue. She had then cross-referenced her findings with recent auction pamphlets and newspaper clippings found in the larger Winchester library on one of three day trips there, trying to learn about recent sales at auction and the condition and appraised value of similar texts.
She was excited to finish up tonight because sleeping just above her was Yardley Sinclair. When she had attended the reading of James Knight’s will and realized that a distant male relative could pop up at any minute and claim the contents of the library as his own, Evie had vowed to complete the cataloguing as soon as possible so that she could finally share with Miss Knight some accurate sense of its total value. When Evie had learned that one of the estate appraisers from Sotheby’s would be joining the society, the very Mr. Sinclair with whom she had many times ended up on the phone during his extended professional wooing of Miss Knight, Evie now had an equally pressing reason to complete her mission.
Because Evie had done the math—and if she was even just half as bright as she thought she was, there were possibly tens of thousands of pounds sterling worth of books in this one room alone.
Evie had separated onto two neighbouring shelves the most important volumes to her mind, which were also the most difficult to appraise. They included a first edition of the posthumous 1817 publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, with the preface by Jane’s brother James. There were also inscribed early editions of the books Austen had written and lived to see published, some of them still in fragile plain boards, which made them even rarer than the custom-bound versions more widely available on the market back then. There was the mysterious 1816 Philadelphia printing of Emma that had somehow made its way over the pond; first editions of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Fanny Burney’s Camilla, and Corinne by Madame de Staël; and an early edition in French of Dante’s Divine Comedy. A Third Folio edition of the collected works of Shakespeare could not even be properly valued, so rarely had it ever come up for sale according to the research Evie had done one Sunday afternoon at the British Museum. And, most amazing of all, there was the letter from Jane to Cassandra that Evie had found last September tucked and hidden inside an old Germanic textbook. A letter that the world did not know existed. A letter that answered a few questions scholars had had for decades—and raised many more.
As Evie sat on her little stool, her completed catalogue open on her lap, she felt the ecstasy of discovery. The passion of learning. The pride of having achieved something no one else had done before. She was not quite seventeen, and the village boys might circle round for a few years more, but she could not imagine a feeling more complete, more satisfying, than what she was experiencing at this moment. She thought of the famous Arctic explorers crossing flat white lands of ice, and Captain Cook sailing to the Pacific, and the men who had started and fought wars over the centuries, and all that male energy going outward, seeking to conquer, seeking to own. And she had gone inward in a way, into the confines of a neglected old house, not even truly a home anymore. She had seen the thing right under everyone’s eyes, and she hadn’t let it go or been subsumed by the rigours of daily life. She had made space for discovery in the midst of a most contained life, the life that the world seemed bent on handing her. She had watched Miss Frances float through that world like a ghost, and Adam Berwick sit alone atop his old hay wagon, and Dr. Gray walk through town with that strange faraway look in his eyes, as if he were looking past reality, past pain, to a kinder, gentler world. But a world that did not exist. For the world that really existed demanded the pain, and the living with it, and would never let you go even when everything else fell away.