Лорен Уиллиг - The Mischief of the Mistletoe

[Several paragraphs omitted]

Thank you for your excellent suggestion regarding the hero in First Impressions. Can you really imagine I would change his name from Darcy to Parsnip?

Yours ever truly,

J. A.

First and foremost, to Brooke, my little sister, and Claudia Brittenham, the best college roommate in the whole wide world, who both put in massive scads of overtime on this book. Thank you for holding my hand through character conundrums and plot nightmares and for convincing me to retrieve those first six chapters from the recycle bin. I love you both.

To Kara Cesare, my former editor, who cheered me through the beginning of this project, and to Erika Imranyi, my new editor, who valiantly picked it up in the middle. And, as always, to Joe Veltre, my agent, who makes this and all things possible.

To my parents, for being nothing like Arabella’s, and to my friends, for reminding me that there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Last but not least, to Miss Austen, who set the tone for generations of novels to come. What would the world be without Lizzy and Darcy?

In the winter of 1803, Jane Austen was twenty-eight years old and living with her family at Sydney Place, in Bath. Biographers agree that Austen was less than pleased with this arrangement. The move from Steventon to Bath in 1800, just after her twenty-fifth birthday, had been much against her wishes. She found Bath, in her own words, “vapour, shadow, smoke and confusion,” and the people disagreeable. The Bath years were ones of discontent and dead ends. In December of 1802, Austen received a proposal from a family friend, a man of fortune and property, Mr. Harris Bigg-Withers. The proposal must have been a tempting one, to be mistress of her own household — but Austen, having yielded to worldly considerations and accepted his proposal, immediately thought better of it. She rescinded her acceptance the next day and hastened back to Bath. In another disappointment, in 1803, a publisher accepted her novel, Susan (later Northanger Abbey ), but failed to bring it to publication.

Unfortunately, there is little in Austen’s own voice to tell us about this period in her life. Due to the destruction of most of her letters after her death, only 160 remain extant. In this period, the period between 1801 and 1805, only one letter survives, written from Lyme in September of 1804.

What we do know is that towards the end of 1803 Austen began work on a new novel. By 1800, when she made the move to Bath, Austen had already written First Impressions (later Pride and Prejudice ), Elinor and Marianne (later Sense and Sensibility ) and Susan (Northanger Abbey ). Her later works, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and Sanditon, were all written much later in her life, after 1812. The Bath years mark a long, fallow period, broken only by one, incomplete work: The Watsons.

The Watsons follows the plight of a young lady, who, like many characters in Austen’s books, has been wrenched from her family as a young child and sent to live with a wealthy aunt in the expectation of becoming her aunt’s heiress. When her aunt contracts an imprudent match to a fortune-hunting army officer, Emma Watson is thrown back upon the bosom of her family: an ailing clergyman father and three unmarried sisters. Critics have commented on the dark tone of this work. In Jane Austen: A Life, Claire Tomalin writes that “[t]he conversations [Austen] wrote for the Watson sisters are strikingly grimmer than anything else in her work,” while in Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels, Deirdre La Faye refers to The Watsons as “a bitter re-run of Pride and Prejudice, ” positing that Austen might have dropped it because it “was becoming too sad,” the situation of Emma and her sisters and their ailing clergyman father being far too close to home.

I borrowed the basic premise of The Watsons for this book, although in Austen’s version, Emma is the youngest sister rather than the oldest. Margaret, Arabella’s most troublesome sister, is lifted straight out of The Watsons, as are the invalid father and Aunt Osborne and the fortune-hunting army officer. Like Arabella, Austen’s Emma Watson plays with the idea of relieving the burden on her family by finding work at a school, a notion her sister strongly deplores. There all resemblance ends. There is no indication in The Watsons that the aunt’s second husband had previously courted Emma, nor are there any French spies or English gentlemen named after vegetables.

Even more telling, Austen’s heroine decides not to take up work at a school; mine does. From her own school days at Mrs. La Tournelle’s Ladies’ Boarding School at Reading, Austen retained a distaste for young ladies’ scholastic institutions that came out loud and clear in her novels. The school in which I place Arabella is a larger, more luxurious version of the institutions with which Austen would have been familiar. Like Miss Climpson, Mrs. La Tournelle hired a number of young woman teachers who conducted the actual instruction, while she presided over the institution. For the sake of my story (and since this was a rather more luxe institution than the one Austen attended), I gave the girls private rooms; at Mrs. La Tournelle’s they would have slept six to a room.

The haphazard nature of the educational program, however, is true to form. A contemporary of Austen’s at Mrs. La Tournelle’s described it as a place “where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into an education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.” According to Austen’s biographers, the curriculum included French, spelling, needlework, deportment, dancing, music — and, surprisingly, theatre. The inspiration for the Christmas recital at Miss Climpson’s came directly from Mrs. La Tournelle’s boarding school, where the girls took part in a number of amateur theatricals.

Biographers have debated why Austen failed to finish The Watsons. Her nephew, Austen-Leigh, posited that she abandoned it because her heroine was too socially lowly. Jon Spence, in Becoming Jane Austen, attributes it to her recognition of the grim tone of the novel, arguing, “She had given free rein to the expression of her own bitterness, and it signals her defeat in trying to write The Watsons... [S]he did not want to write such a novel.” Claire Tomalin believes “a more likely reason” may have been because “the theme of the story touched too closely on Jane’s fears for herself.” According to Austen’s older sister, Cassandra, Austen intended to kill off Emma Watson’s father partway through the novel. Deirde Le Faye posits that the death of Austen’s own father, early in 1805, may have been the stimulus for abandoning the book. Far more fun, all around, to pretend that the cause lay in Christmas puddings, French spies, and a man named Turnip.

For those wishing to hear more of Austen in her own voice, there are her letters, reprinted by Pavilion Press (I shamelessly culled phrases from Austen’s extant letters for the letter to Arabella at the front of this book), and her juvenilia, compiled in Catharine and Other Writings. For contemporary, or near-contemporary, recollections, one can go to J. E. Austen-Leigh’s Memoir and Caroline Austen’s My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir and Reminiscences. Biographies of the authoress include, among the more recent efforts, Claire Tomalin’s Jane Austen: A Life, Jon Spence’s Becoming Jane Austen, and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen. Deirdre Le Faye’s Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels does an excellent job of situating both the authoress and her novels in cultural context. I also owe a debt of gratitude for the Morgan Library’s fortuitously timed exhibit “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy,” which provided a rare opportunity to see letters and manuscript pages written in her own hand, books from her library, and contemporary images of people, places, and events that touched on her life.

As a final note, you may have noticed some differences between Christmas as we know it and as Arabella and Turnip experience it. Much of what we associate with a “traditional” English Christmas came over with Victoria’s Albert from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. The iconic Christmas tree was introduced by Queen Charlotte in 1800, but only became popular during the reign of her granddaughter, Queen Victoria. Carols were also a Victorian addition to the Christmas canon. Although I did include some anachronisms (like the Christmas pageant), for the folks at Miss Climpson’s and at Girdings House, I tried to re-create the earlier model of Christmas celebration, in which the halls would have been decked with holly — but no tree — and the main celebration took place on Twelfth Night, rather than Christmas proper. Different parts of England had their own regional traditions, including the fascinating Epiphany Eve ritual of frightening away the evil spirits that I co-opted for my characters.

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