indignation quieted and she was left to deal with the guilt she had tried to ignore:
I shall reply to Albert at my earliest opportunity and make a clean breast of it … tomorrow.
1 Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
2 The Second Great Fire of London, when the German air force dropped more than 24,000 high explosives and over 100,000 incendiary bombs on London. The iconic image is of St Paul’s Cathedral wrapped in smoke and flame, but which survived that night.
3 In
The Lost World
4 A murder-mystery play by Christie that has been performed continuously since 1952. Attendees are urged not to divulge that the killer is
Virtual Chawton
Jane Austen’s online home
O n his iPad, Stephen pawed his way through the inventory, amazed again at the detail available at Virtual Chawton. He was now looking at the section detailing what the library at Chawton House no longer had in its collection or at the nearby Chawton Cottage. He knew, for instance, that Chawton Cottage 1 had for many years been used to house estate workers and even served as a village library and that most of the Regency era belongings had been lost, sold, or pilfered. The inventory attempted to catalogue what exactly had gone missing.
The inventories of what remained and what had been lost were so extensive and so freely available, that Stephen marvelled at what information the Austen claimant could have provided that wasn’t public. The philanthropist who’d funded the project had inadvertently made it quite difficult for anyone to claim Austen’s identity.
There was speculation that the curators of the library and/or the cottage had withheld some crucial piece of information or that the Austen claimant knew of some memento hitherto undiscovered. But examining the inventory was ultimately a dead, if fascinating end.
He was sitting on the hallway floor, next to his advisor’s office door, when he heard Dr Davis’s heavy tread approaching, put his tablet to sleep and stood waiting for her. He watched with some appreciation his advisor’s advance, amused how the people in the corridor shied away from her. She actually had a pleasant expression on her face, but her size and determined step ensured she had the right of way.
She merely nodded to Stephen upon reaching the door and then unlocked it and entered. Stephen followed and deposited his bag on the spare chair. He waited for Davis to put away her purse, look through the letters she had carried in and finally give him her full attention.
He was no longer frightened of her but she still did command his respect. She was a rigorous mentor who could spot a flaw in his reasoning just from his choice of adjectives and knew when he was hiding sloppy research. Unfortunately she was not quite as rigorous in her own scholarship. She attributed to Austen motives and ideals that Stephen thought heavy handed. He tended to think that most authors simply wrote and if their work exhibited themes and motifs and abstractions, that was just the happy coincidence of the author’s experiences and prejudices infiltrating their writing.
But his mentor saw grand schemes in Austen, some of which Stephen begrudged, and others that he didn’t. His thesis, that Austen’s awareness of the political and social changes during the Regency was profound, coincided with Davis’ opinion. Her argument—that Austen was pursuing a feminist agenda that would have become apparent in
Sanditon
had Austen finished it—he found less convincing.
Despite their less than perfect unanimity, he had enjoyed being her graduate student. Her recent
idée fixe
, 2 however, was becoming tiresome.
“So, Stephen, what have you learned about filing an exception to an identity?” she asked. She had folded her hands together in exactly the same way his high school principal had used when admonishing him for smoking grass underneath the stadium bleachers.
“Uh, I learned you can’t really file an exception once an identity has been … bestowed. Another
I shall reply to Albert at my earliest opportunity and make a clean breast of it … tomorrow.
1 Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
2 The Second Great Fire of London, when the German air force dropped more than 24,000 high explosives and over 100,000 incendiary bombs on London. The iconic image is of St Paul’s Cathedral wrapped in smoke and flame, but which survived that night.
3 In
The Lost World
4 A murder-mystery play by Christie that has been performed continuously since 1952. Attendees are urged not to divulge that the killer is
Virtual Chawton
Jane Austen’s online home
O n his iPad, Stephen pawed his way through the inventory, amazed again at the detail available at Virtual Chawton. He was now looking at the section detailing what the library at Chawton House no longer had in its collection or at the nearby Chawton Cottage. He knew, for instance, that Chawton Cottage 1 had for many years been used to house estate workers and even served as a village library and that most of the Regency era belongings had been lost, sold, or pilfered. The inventory attempted to catalogue what exactly had gone missing.
The inventories of what remained and what had been lost were so extensive and so freely available, that Stephen marvelled at what information the Austen claimant could have provided that wasn’t public. The philanthropist who’d funded the project had inadvertently made it quite difficult for anyone to claim Austen’s identity.
There was speculation that the curators of the library and/or the cottage had withheld some crucial piece of information or that the Austen claimant knew of some memento hitherto undiscovered. But examining the inventory was ultimately a dead, if fascinating end.
He was sitting on the hallway floor, next to his advisor’s office door, when he heard Dr Davis’s heavy tread approaching, put his tablet to sleep and stood waiting for her. He watched with some appreciation his advisor’s advance, amused how the people in the corridor shied away from her. She actually had a pleasant expression on her face, but her size and determined step ensured she had the right of way.
She merely nodded to Stephen upon reaching the door and then unlocked it and entered. Stephen followed and deposited his bag on the spare chair. He waited for Davis to put away her purse, look through the letters she had carried in and finally give him her full attention.
He was no longer frightened of her but she still did command his respect. She was a rigorous mentor who could spot a flaw in his reasoning just from his choice of adjectives and knew when he was hiding sloppy research. Unfortunately she was not quite as rigorous in her own scholarship. She attributed to Austen motives and ideals that Stephen thought heavy handed. He tended to think that most authors simply wrote and if their work exhibited themes and motifs and abstractions, that was just the happy coincidence of the author’s experiences and prejudices infiltrating their writing.
But his mentor saw grand schemes in Austen, some of which Stephen begrudged, and others that he didn’t. His thesis, that Austen’s awareness of the political and social changes during the Regency was profound, coincided with Davis’ opinion. Her argument—that Austen was pursuing a feminist agenda that would have become apparent in
Sanditon
had Austen finished it—he found less convincing.
Despite their less than perfect unanimity, he had enjoyed being her graduate student. Her recent
idée fixe
, 2 however, was becoming tiresome.
“So, Stephen, what have you learned about filing an exception to an identity?” she asked. She had folded her hands together in exactly the same way his high school principal had used when admonishing him for smoking grass underneath the stadium bleachers.
“Uh, I learned you can’t really file an exception once an identity has been … bestowed. Another
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