The Jane Austen Society(25)

Then one day Evie read a piece on Virginia Woolf in a copy of The Times Literary Supplement left by the fire for kindling, and it quoted Woolf as saying that Jane Austen was the hardest of all great writers to catch in the act of greatness. For Evie, working for the Knight family, although on the decline, was bringing her one step closer to that greatness. Miss Lewis had said as much to her one day in the village, when she learned where the young girl would be working. Evie continued to console herself over the early departure from school by thinking about her unique proximity to the very environment that had helped inform some of the greatest novels ever written.

This was when the idea of trying to get even closer to the Austen legacy had first popped into Evie’s head.

As she had learned from Miss Lewis in school, Austen’s father had enjoyed a library of hundreds of books in their parsonage home in the village of Steventon, and young Jane had been encouraged to read anything and everything she found on its shelves. Miss Lewis similarly believed that there was no such thing as a “bad” book in terms of content: her mantra to both the class and the trustees was that if something had ever happened before in real life, then it was completely fair game to put it down in print. In fact, it was demanded of it. Miss Lewis was convinced that young Jane’s being allowed to run rampant among fairly “adult” material had informed her gift for irony at an ideal age, giving her years of juvenile writing to perfect it.

Evie knew that the Knight family library, as it stood today, must also contain books that Austen would have borrowed, and the more time that Evie spent both overtly dusting and covertly examining the volumes in the library, analyzing their bookplates and marginalia and degree of wear, the more it occurred to her that a cataloguing of sorts could help compose a picture of Jane’s reading tastes from that last critical decade of her life.

So Evie secretly kept a small scrapbook hidden in one of the shelves, and in it she wrote down anything of note as she worked her way through the thousands of volumes, one by one. She had been at this for nearly a year and a half, most often late at night when everyone else had gone to bed, having herself been allocated a small bedroom in the third-floor attic. This was generous of Miss Knight to provide, as it saved Evie a long walk home at the end of the day. But she had not yet confided in anyone, not even Miss Knight, about what she was doing, sitting here on the little stool, night after night. Young and unschooled though she was, Evie was convinced that this library held valuable insights into Jane Austen—and possibly a few books of immeasurable worth—and she was canny enough to know to keep this pursuit to herself, at least for now. Earlier that same day she had heard Miss Knight on the phone with someone from Sotheby’s and learned just enough to confirm that, with the war now over, interest in Jane Austen’s possessions, letters, and handwriting was starting to significantly heat up.

So far, Evie had catalogued fifteen hundred of the over two thousand books on the shelves, averaging a handful of volumes a night. She had estimated from the start that it would take close to two years to get through each and every book to the extent that she intended. She knew that the entire exercise would end up meaningless unless she went through every single page of every single book. The risk of missing a small set of initials, a scratch of handwriting—or, God forbid, a marking by Jane Austen herself—was simply too great.

The most onerous and time-consuming work involved copying down all the title and copyright page information, as well as any lengthy marginalia, into her little notebook. Some nights, only a few volumes could be summarized as a result. She did give herself weekend nights off, primarily because she usually went home to help her mother on the farm and to visit with her father. She knew herself well enough to know that—just as with Miss Adeline’s list of books—she would otherwise compulsively proceed apace, day after day, with no nightly break from the challenge she had set herself.

Now, on this quiet, moonlit September night, with only a low-placed kerosene lamp to guide her, Evie was turning the pages of a volume—one of ten in a set—of an ancient Germanic-language text. Each text was several hundred pages long, making the entire collection thousands of pages of work for her. The odds of finding any margin notations at all in a work on the German language and its origins struck even her, for all her investigative spirit, as virtually non-existent.

At moments such as this, Evie always felt the most tempted to cut a few corners and race ahead. But her ability to forge on and heed that other voice in her head—the one that told her she was special, no matter what the outside world reflected back at her—was one of the things that she knew made her unique. So she always listened to this insistent inner voice, no matter how apathetic or tired she felt, and right now this voice was telling her not to give up.

It was now nearing two A.M., Evie’s usual finishing time. Through trial and exercise she was learning to live on four hours of sleep a night. She was confident she could keep to this routine for at least several more months. Besides, lack of sleep was no deterrence—her days at the house were busy yet so mundane, so bereft of intellectual challenge, that she found herself living for these quiet nights to herself.

As Evie turned the pages of the large, dense volume still in her hands—pages so thick that it took actual effort sometimes to pry their edges open—she could feel a slight bulging in the section coming up. She skipped eagerly ahead to it, and as she flipped over the final page, a letter fell out.