The Jane Austen Society(90)

Mimi Harrison was currently onstage at the New Theatre as Olivia in Twelfth Night, and so Sunday was chosen for the annual meeting as there was no evening performance that day. She would be bringing her new fiancé with her, a Harvard professor of American literature currently on sabbatical at Jesus College, Cambridge. She was also secretly planning to announce a gift to the society at the meeting: a turquoise-and-gold ring that had once belonged to Jane Austen and was considered priceless, along with two topaz crosses.

Dr. Benjamin Gray, Chairman of the Jane Austen Society and the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, would be delivering the opening address. His wife, Adeline Lewis Grover Gray, was due to deliver their first child in a month’s time, and the date of the annual meeting had also been selected with that important obligation in mind.

Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Henry Forrester, Esq., had recently relocated to Chawton from Alton, where Mr. Forrester’s law offices had expanded to include two junior solicitors. He was now able to turn his attention to other endeavours, the most important of which was the small local hostel his wife had set up using her share of the estate sale. The hostel was intended for Jewish refugee children who had lost their families in the Holocaust and had no homes to return to after the war. That very month official adoption papers were being finalized by the couple for two of these children; with Mr. Forrester’s full support, their last name would be Knight.

Evie Stone had just completed the Lent Term at the University of Cambridge and was working hard on the April launch of the first issue of its new student paper, Varsity. The society was very aware that Evie posed a significant flight risk as she had been able, with the financial support of Mr. and Mrs. Forrester, to finally complete her grammar schooling in 1946 under the accelerated tutelage of the new Mrs. Dr. Gray. Evie successfully gained admission to Cambridge in her eighteenth year in January 1947, as part of the postwar admission to full membership of women students in general.

Jack Leonard would not be attending the meeting. He was currently under indictment by the US federal government for gun-running during World War II, in violation of various domestic and international treaties. He was also, following an anonymous tip, under continuing investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for insider trading.

Yardley Sinclair had been promoted to director of museum services for Sotheby’s in recognition of his acquisition and sale of the Chawton Great House Library, which had yielded its record-breaking dispersal. The significant increase in his compensation had enabled the aspiring gentleman farmer to finally start looking for his long-dreamt-of bolt hole for weekends out of the city.

Adam Berwick had lost his employment following the redevelopment of Chawton Great House into a golf course, shortly on the heels of the death of his mother. Fortunately, he must have somehow inherited a significant amount of money, as he was soon able—in joint tenancy with Mr. Sinclair—to acquire ownership of a lovely little farm on the perimeter of Chawton. On beautiful spring weekends, he and Yardley could be seen sitting atop the old hay wagon, their dog Dixon between them, riding about the village fields under the golden dappled sun.





Historical Note by the Author

The people and events described in this book are completely fictional and imaginary; the places are not.

In wanting to write about a group of people traumatized to varying degrees, who come together over their shared love of books and of Jane Austen in particular, I chose not to base the characters on anyone real in order to enjoy full artistic freedom and consulted historical Chawton census records available online to avoid using actual villager surnames. The only exceptions are the names Knight, Knatchbull, and Hugessen, but again I completely fictionalized the branches, inheritance patterns, and descendants of these families, as portrayed in this book, for my own dramatic purposes.

In reimagining the conception of the Jane Austen Society, I used as my jumping-off point one particular incident that did in fact occur: the finding of a piece of rubbish by the road that inspired Dorothy Darnell of Alton to found the real Jane Austen Society in 1940 and try to acquire the old steward’s cottage for a museum. Unfortunately, funds were scarce due to the war, but in 1948 Thomas Edward Carpenter donated the cottage to the nation in memory of his son killed in action in World War II, a memorial trust was formed, and the Jane Austen’s House Museum came to life. The objects that you can see in this museum, including the topaz crosses and the turquoise ring, were not acquired by a Hollywood star of the 1940s at a Sotheby’s auction, but were brought home nonetheless under fascinating circumstances.

Finally, Chawton House remained under the care and ownership of the real-life Knight family until the early 1990s, when they were forced by inordinate estate taxes and repair costs to sell first to a golf course development company, which soon after defaulted, and then to philanthropist Sandy Lerner, co-founder of Cisco Systems, who restored the home and turned it into the world-class library and heritage site that it is today.

If you are lucky enough to one day visit Chawton House, you will find the Great House, the grounds and the walled garden, and even the shepherd’s hut as described herein. The one major change is the location of the Knight family library, from a more removed corner of the ground floor to next to the Great Hall, thus enabling a host of fictional characters to run into each other and set my story into action.





Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the stewardship of my agent, Mitchell Waters, who embraced my story and characters with his big heart from the very start and never let them go.