Free Writing Jane Austen by Elizabeth Aston

wouldn’t pay her rent here, nor would it pay off her overdraft. Try for another academic post? Even if she were successful, it wouldn’t be for this academic year.
    She was a professional writer. Did one published novel make you a professional writer? Yes, it did. So if she could produce something acceptable for Dan Vesey and Livia, it would buy her time. Time to finish Jane Silversmith’s story and get back on track with the kind of fiction she really wanted to write: thoughtful, challenging, socially aware historical fiction. Other writers turned out porn or chick lit or young adult books to earn money in order to be able to take the time to write good stuff; why not her?
    Only, was trying to emulate the writing of a woman considered by some to be England’s greatest novelist quite the same as churning out porn or teen angst?
    It was all a matter of perspective. She had to pick up where JA left off and come up with some kind of pastiche. Could she do it? Four hundred and fifty pages of romantic sensibility and middle-class matchmaking, that was all it was. Anybody could do that, surely.
    She felt a sudden surge of confidence. Yes, she could do it. It was a matter of self-discipline, of completing an allotted task in a specific way. She’d never flinched at hard work, and now three months’ hard work would solve all her problems. Well, most of them.
    It was after lunch when she finally took the contract out of its envelope, and, under the stern gaze of Henry, Maud and Anna, signed the three copies.
    “Without reading it, I note,” said Henry, adding his signature as witness. “Is that wise?”
    “Like I’m going to argue about a contract approved by Livia.”
    “Let me see.” Henry turned to the first page and began to read it through paragraph by paragraph. He whistled when he came to the payments clause. “No trouble paying your rent for a while then.”
    He read on. “The delivery date’s tight.”
    “Yes, as I said, and I’ll have to give the money back if I don’t make it. ‘Time is of the essence’ is what it says.”
    “Get writing,” Maud said. “Or, no, not yet. Get reading. Start with
Northanger Abbey
and
Sense and Sensibility
. Then
Pride and Prejudice
, what a treat,
Mansfield Park
,
Emma
and
Persuasion
. Won’t take you long, you’ll get swept up into them and time will whiz by.”
    “Begin with
Pride and Prejudice
,” advised Henry. “It’s the quickest way to find out what you’ve been missing.”
    Dressed too early for going out, and knowing that despite her best efforts, her clothes wouldn’t stand up to Livia’s scrutiny, Georgina sat for a long time at the window of the sitting room, looking out at the street. The street Robert Browning must have walked down on his way to visit Elizabeth in Wimpole Street. A street that would have been there even in Jane Austen’s day.
    Carriages, not cars, going past. Horse dung in the streets, crossing boys at the corner. Street criers. Chimneys belching smoke,
no Clean Air Act in those days. Henry said that this hadn’t been the smartest part of town; it was genteel, beyond the fringes of the magic rectangle of Piccadilly and the parks where the rich and the noble lived.
    Jane Austen’s London? Had Jane Austen ever been to London? Was she a Londoner? Surely not, surely a country girl. Although she must have lived in Bath, people were always talking about Jane Austen’s Bath.
    Not that she’d ever been to Bath, although she had promised herself a trip. She had a friend from college who’d married anEnglishman and now lived in Bath. Bel had issued an open invitation, which she’d never taken up. Her trips were to places like Liverpool and Manchester and Salford, not enclaves of the middle classes, like Bath.
    She heard the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves and looked down to see a figure on horseback, a man in a blue coat. Trotting past. She knew people rode in the park, but she’d never seen a horseman in this street before.
    Across