Bad Austen (22 page)
Authors: Peter Archer
“I am sorry to have vexed you. Calm your nerves. Sit a while before you depart. Have some cold meats.”
“I am not in need of sitting. I want to walk.”
“Walk? It’s nearly a half-mile to tara. And in all this heat.”
“I will walk. I pledge to god I shall never sit again until I reach tara. I am most exceedingly obliged to you, Ashley. Please accept my wishes for your health and happiness, but I must be off to tara to tell Rhett I love him.”
Scarlett was as surprised as anyone to hear this proclamation. The working of her heart had been hardened by the business of maintaining tara, but tara now seemed a mere pile of bricks and wood that was tumbling down while her heart, a real woman’s heart, was building up.
“Rhett, where are you? I walked a half-mile in the sun without a parasol to see you, and I would have walked a mile entire, just to tell you my feelings for you have changed. I am embarrassed to think what I said before, but now I know what I feel in my heart. You are the most amiable associate of my alliances. Please tell me I am not too late. Do I still have a chance to win you back?”
Rhett descended the lengthy staircase, which was quite suitable to the position of a gentleman and by no means lacking in good taste. “Why Scarlett, I am all astonishment. But are you unwell?”
“No, I assure you I am in complete wellness. Is there truth that you are quitting my company?”
“It was my plan before you had arrived. I was prepared to tell you, by george I could care not a wit, but now I find my feelings are quite reversed. Your manners, on closer acquaintance, have improved. Could this be a dream, my darling Scarlett?”
“No, I am sure I am awake. But let us put a test to that theory.”
Rhett grasped Scarlett’s not unsmall waist. His back arched as he bowed down toward her pouty red mouth. The moment until their lips met seemed an eternity; indeed a flock of birds could have passed in the space between until they finally consummated the kiss. It was a dream of a kiss, but it was not a dream. Awake they were, and would be thus all night to the consternation of the neighbors.
D
ID
Y
OU
K
NOW?
With the success of
Sense and Sensibility
, the publisher was certainly interested in Jane Austen’s next novel. In revising
First Impressions
, the novel she had begun in 1796, which her father had unsuccessfully tried to have published, Jane made the manuscript quite a bit shorter than the version Mr. Austen had sent to Thomas Cadell. Thomas Egerton offered £110 for the novel she now called
Pride and Prejudice
, and although Jane had hoped for more, she accepted his offer, apparently to save Henry (and Eliza) from having to advance money again.
Pride and Prejudice
was published in January of 1813.
The reviews and general public response to this new novel were even more enthusiastic than they had been for
Sense and Sensibility
. Once again, Austen could enjoy the direct praise of only a few people because this book, too, was published anonymously, “by the Author of
Sense and Sensibility
.” In those days, ladies did not seek to draw public attention to themselves. Rather than basking in the limelight of successful authorship, Jane was quietly living in the Hampshire countryside. After the publication of the book Jane so lovingly—and rightly—referred to as “my own darling Child,” she and Mrs. Austen took turns reading from it to their neighbor, a poor spinster named Miss Benn. What an extraordinary picture that must have made, and all the more amusing because Miss Benn—also kept in the dark about Jane’s secret—did not know she was in the presence of the author!
W
oman of
W
onder
S
HANNON
W
INSLOW
No one who had ever seen Wonder Woman in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine. Her character, situation, and temper were all equally against such an eventuality. And fate seemed at first wholly disinclined to lend a hand.
A glimpse of little Diana—for so she was then called—surely conjured up no image of future greatness in the behold-er’s eye. Indeed, as Amazons go, her looks did not exceed the average by a single jot. A graceless figure, an awkward fashion sense, and a total want of complexion combined to ill effect. The resulting picture all but shouted that this child was destined for mediocrity.
Equally unpropitious for heroism seemed the turn of little Diana’s mind. She greatly preferred reading to the more standard juvenile pursuits—swordplay, mastering the lasso, fending off lightning bolts—and rarely attended to the insinuations of her well-intentioned relations that she would be wise to cultivate whatsoever latent superpowers she might possess.
Such were Diana’s youthful propensities. But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of every disobliging circumstance imaginable cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a call to heroism in her way.
By and by, her looks improved tolerably, and her other abilities developed apace to the point that her marshal arts master went so far as to call her efforts “satisfactory.” Then, on the day of her eighteenth birthday, she cast a most auspicious gaze across the mystical veil that hung betwixt her home on the island of Themiscyra and the sphere of Man. Diana happened to spy there a handsome mortal of a more than usually interesting aspect, whom she thereafter made the subject of her constant study.
During a mandatory warrior-training class one day, she confided her observations to her best friend, Anita, who is also known as Power girl. “He is just what a young man ought to be,” Diana said, deftly evading the saber thrust of her male sparing partner. “tall—a singular virtue to which every young man must by all means aspire—and I never saw such a happy union of noble character and physical perfection. Certainly, I’ve not encountered his equal in this place,” she said with a disdainful glare at the feeble specimen cowering at the point of her sword.
“Then I give you leave to like him … from afar, that is,” replied Anita, registering a hit against her opponent as well. “I daresay this man of yours may be possessed of a little more wit than the rest, but mortals are by nature stupid and helpless creatures.”
“What care I for such trifles? I simply must be near him; nothing else will do.”
“Do not be rash, Diana! As you well know, the only way for one of us to cross over to the human world is in the guise of a superhero.”
“Then my course is clear.”
And thus, Wonder Woman came into being.
D
ID
Y
OU
K
NOW?
Jane fainted at news of her family’s move to Bath, tradition has it, not only because she very much loved Steventon—the only home she’d ever known—but also because she hated Bath—and, indeed, cities in general. Critics and biographers have turned to the letters Jane wrote while she was anticipating the move and detected that she was putting on a good front but was in fact very unhappy.
Jane describes Bath in a letter as “vapour, shadow, smoke & confusion,” which does not sound as if she liked the place very much. Her other letters from the first weeks in Bath are also rather depressed-sounding. “I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreeable,” she writes rather hopelessly to Cassandra. Jane attends social gatherings and gives reports of them that are either complaints about their disagreeableness or sharp-edged jokes about those present. There is little evidence that she was finding life in Bath very enjoyable at the beginning of her stay there.
In
Northanger Abbey
, Catherine Morland finds it a delightful place, astonishing in the variety of people and activities it offers, especially when compared with the sleepy country village she has come from. As Mrs. Allen inimitably puts it, “it is just the place for young people—and indeed for every body else too.” Catherine more sensibly, if naively, exclaims, “Oh! who can ever be tired of Bath?” Henry Tilney’s answer to her probably rhetorical question may hold the key to evaluating Bath’s general pleasantness or unpleasantness: “Not those who bring such fresh feelings of every sort to it, as you do.” In other words, Catherine “was come to be happy,” and thus Bath made her so. Did Jane Austen come there to be happy herself?
T
wilight at
N
orthanger
A
NNE
G
LOVER
Inheritance is not always a boon. A penchant for too many cakes, the propensity to freckle under the slightest provocation of sun, and the habit of being a spendthrift were all traits one might inherit. The discovery of such inheritance was seldom as grave as the reading of a will; the recognition of such a family trait was realized when in connection with conflict.
Cathy Morland, nee tilney’s youngest sister, Jane, had inherited her dusty old collection of novels and along with it a great passion for the macabre. Like Catherine, Jane was wont to spend a whole day idle with a book ignoring her daily tasks and exasperating poor Mrs. Morland who, in her advancing years, had little more patience for a whimsical girl.
It was so that when Catherine’s letter came announcing the demise of Captain Wentworth and Mr. tilney’s sudden inheritance of Northanger Abbey, her pleas for a spare sister to be sent in assistance of the great move was a welcome relief to the beleaguered Mrs. Morland.
Jane was bundled into Mr. tilney’s carriage, sent after the receipt of Mrs. Morland’s response, on a brisk March morning. The journey was not overlong so that the tilneys had sent Coachman and a groom to protect the young traveler.
Thrilled beyond anticipation, Jane tucked herself against the squabs and into a deliciously ghoulish novel.
Enraptured by the terrifying tale, Jane did not even notice when the carriage came to an abrupt halt.
It took moments before she looked up, finally noticing that the comfortable pace had ceased.
“Hello?” she called. The only answer was silence.
Jane set her book aside and slid toward the window. “Hello?” She asked again, her voice meek and a little afraid. The silence was deafening.