Jane Actually

advisor’s advance, amused how the people in the corridor shied away from her. She actually had a pleasant expression on her face, but her size and determined step ensured she had the right of way.
    She merely nodded to Stephen upon reaching the door and then unlocked it and entered. Stephen followed and deposited his bag on the spare chair. He waited for Davis to put away her purse, look through the letters she had carried in and finally give him her full attention.
    He was no longer frightened of her but she still did command his respect. She was a rigorous mentor who could spot a flaw in his reasoning just from his choice of adjectives and knew when he was hiding sloppy research. Unfortunately she was not quite as rigorous in her own scholarship. She attributed to Austen motives and ideals that Stephen thought heavy handed. He tended to think that most authors simply wrote and if their work exhibited themes and motifs and abstractions, that was just the happy coincidence of the author’s experiences and prejudices infiltrating their writing.
    But his mentor saw grand schemes in Austen, some of which Stephen begrudged, and others that he didn’t. His thesis, that Austen’s awareness of the political and social changes during the Regency was profound, coincided with Davis’ opinion. Her argument—that Austen was pursuing a feminist agenda that would have become apparent in
Sanditon
had Austen finished it—he found less convincing.
    Despite their less than perfect unanimity, he had enjoyed being her graduate student. Her recent
idée fixe
, 2 however, was becoming tiresome.
    “So, Stephen, what have you learned about filing an exception to an identity?” she asked. She had folded her hands together in exactly the same way his high school principal had used when admonishing him for smoking grass underneath the stadium bleachers.
    “Uh, I learned you can’t really file an exception once an identity has been … bestowed. Another person can make a claim to the identity and if it’s deemed credible, then a review of the previous claim can be made. But you’d have to be dead to make that claim, and I don’t think you want to carry it that far.” He said this last with a smile, hoping he could get her to recognize the futility of her objections.
    She ignored his attempt at humour, however, and said, “Yes, that’s what I’ve learned as well. And what about the legal status this bestowal confers?”
    Well if you already knew, why the hell did I waste all that time looking it up?
he thought.
    “It’s kind of meaningless, legally. All her copyrights have expired. She’s public domain. Some states have passed laws defining disembodied rights, but that has nothing to do with claiming her estate. There’ve been a few bills proposed to allow the disembodied to make an additional copyright extension, but it wouldn’t affect anything published before 1923.
    “And besides, she’s English, although that’s an abstraction that really doesn’t mean anything once you’re dead. UK law is also in flux, but it doesn’t matter. She can’t claim any proceeds from her previous work, just anything new, like
Sanditon
. What she has done is declare herself a corporation, and once she had the AfterNet’s blessing, other corporations were willing to make deals with her. Ultimately, it’s how well
Sanditon
sells that’ll truly define whether she’s accepted as Austen.”
    Davis nodded several times at this and Stephen got the feeling that again she already knew all this.
    “And what did you learn from Virtual Chawton?”
    “Look, Dr Davis, you know all this. What’s the point of me telling you …” The look on her face convinced him that his best strategy was to humour her.
    “OK, Virtual Chawton, as you already know, is amazing. But I can’t see how that’s going to help us … you. If anything, it makes it obvious that Austen must have known something pretty specific and obscure to prove her identity. Anyone can call up 3D plans of the cottage or the house and see the location, or the supposed location, of everything the house or the cottage ever contained. Maybe she hid a letter under a floorboard that said, ‘In the event of my death, this will be proof of my existence.’”
    “Don’t be facetious, Stephen.”
    “I’m not. Face facts; for all intents and purposes, she’s Austen.”
    She said nothing for a while and Stephen wondered if he’d angered her. His voice had risen slightly because he