The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner Page 0,87

paper, covered in deeply slanted, familiar handwriting.

Yardley took a deep breath. “Are you joking?”

“It’s the only one, though—I’d really hoped to find others. But it’s an important one. It explains a lot.”

“Can I open it?”

She nodded. “It’s not at all fragile—I think it’s been in here for over a hundred years, untouched. And it was not finished, and it was never sent. She must have been interrupted and lost track of where she’d put it. Or”—and here Evie got quite emotional—“she was getting quite sick, I think, at least enough to worry her. And perhaps she just forgot about it or bigger things took over, and she stopped caring about what she had had to say.”

Yardley took the letter gingerly from the book and sat down to read it. When he was finished, he took a second to compose himself. It was the single greatest discovery of his career, and one of the most important finds yet in Austen scholarship.

“You realize the date here? August 6, 1816? The day she finished writing Persuasion.” And then he started to laugh again. “Of course you do.”

Evie nodded and came over and sat back down across from him. “Cassandra wasn’t far, just a small trip away to some relatives it sounds, and yet Austen wasn’t going to wait one second longer to say what she had to say to her older sister. Imagine finishing those final, incredible chapters of Persuasion and then turning straight to writing this letter. That says something. It says some things that are pretty amazing about her—”

“—and also some that aren’t,” Yardley cut in. “And yet how alive, how real—how human—she seems now.”

He read through the letter again, which was cut off abruptly halfway down the back of the single page.

“So Cassandra intervened, then, after all, in the budding romance with the seaside stranger.”

“I don’t have sisters—I have four very awful brothers—but that bond Cassandra and Jane had seems so intense. As if they were their own little family. Like Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, holding in the eye of the storm, everything to each other, leaving little room for anyone else. Easy enough for Cassandra, I suppose, having lost her fiancé so young, making her essentially a respectable widow of sorts. But where did it leave Jane?”

“You know,” Yardley mused aloud, “I always thought it odd that the family of some random guy from a seaside town, a guy Austen presumably had met only that one holiday month, would have written to inform her of his death. Letters must have been going back and forth between the two of them. Or the family knew there was a relationship of some kind, even if just in its early days.” Yardley sat back and placed the open letter carefully on his lap. “So she blamed Cassandra for the romance ending. For all those years.”

“The missing years. All those letters from the same time period gone, destroyed by Cassandra. We’ve always known that. But we never knew why.”

“Until now.”

“Until now,” agreed Evie, sitting there on her little stool, nodding happily at Yardley’s enthusiasm for her discovery.

“So”—he passed the letter back into her waiting hands and stood up, too full of excitement to stay seated—“so Persuasion was indeed her revising of her own life. Her working through the great disappointment. Her working through her residual anger at her sister.”

“By writing this, I think she tried to put a lid back on that anger for good. I think she knew she was not long for this world, and she wanted peace in her heart, full and total peace, and writing this marked the final forgiveness of her sister. And she needed to feel that, needed to be free of it.”

“You know, it’s so strange, but I always wondered if someone like Jane Austen could have existed in the pages of her own books. If you think about it, if Cassandra hadn’t interfered when Jane was—what, twenty-three years old? Twenty-four?—who knows what might have happened. We might never have got the three final books of genius if Austen had gotten her man in the end.”

“I think Austen knew that only too well,” Evie replied. “Especially when you think about so many women at that time dying in childbirth, at least two of her very own sisters-in-law, and her fear about all of that, too. The letters that do survive say as much.”

“Evie, I know we don’t know each other very well.…”

“Oh, no, I think we do.” She smiled at him. “I think we are very