Jane Actually

disliked the idea that she’d allowed herself to get fixated. And he had doubts that anyone could survive two hundred years of solitude and still be coherent enough to pose as Austen. But he admired Austen—that is the original author—enough to hope if anyone had the proper mental makeup, it would be her.
    “You’re right, Stephen. I have to accept what my peers, whoever they were, have decided. I’m sorry to have wasted your time on this. You’ll be happy to know I haven’t completely allowed myself to be absorbed in this quixotic quest. I looked over the draft you sent and can offer a few … recommendations.”
    She appeared to have shrugged off her irritation at his inability to help her and threw herself into her critique of his manuscript. Far from being fooled, however, he finally recognized what lay at the foot of her objections. It was so stunningly obvious:
I didn’t realize it before because I was sure she was on the committee. She’s hurt she wasn’t asked to help identify the most important person in her life.
    1 Chawton Cottage was Jane’s home before her death. Sadly, Virtual Chawton only exists within the pages of this book.
    2 Obsession

Mary Crawford
It beats waiting tables
    “T hank you, Miss Crawford, you’re all done,” the technician told her. Mary opened her eyes and blinked at the brightness of the room after he’d turned the lights back on.
    “We’re done?”
    “Yes, you’re on file now, and when we call you, you’ll be ready to go.”
    He offered her his hand, a gallant gesture she thought, and helped her out of the comfortable chair in which he’d placed her. Then she realized it was a more than gallant gesture; the chair seemed reluctant to let her go.
    Then she stood, feeling just a little sleepy after her five minutes in the dark, resting comfortably while his equipment recorded her unique field signature.
    He ushered her out the door and she walked back to the reception area where she signed herself out and left the agency. She stood outside in the sun and for a moment panic gripped her.
    What if they never call? What if they call me for somebody gross? What if I’m awful at it? What if they call today?
    She tried to reassure herself that the agency wasn’t a scam, like all the “modelling agencies” in the city.
I did hear about it on WNYC. If I can’t trust NPR,
1
who can I trust?
    And so what if they don’t call? I got a lunch out of it. And if they call today, I get my ass back down here and I don’t care if it’s … it’s …
She struggled to think of a truly evil woman, but realized it was a mostly male province. Which made her realize that it wouldn’t be impossible that she might be asked to be the avatar of a dead man.
    Wow, that would be weird. But not weirder than some of the exercises I’ve done in class.
    She headed back to the subway station, her mind more on her crazy acting exercises than where she was going and bumped into a busy commuter who grouchily told her to watch where she was going.
    Damn, get my head back in the game.
She hugged her purse a little more tightly and tried to bring her awareness back to the present, the subway, her fellow commuters and the man smelling of urine scrounging for change.
    She hated the city and if she was honest she hated her decision to be an actress, but that was an admission that she kept firmly squashed into a small corner of her mind.
    She swiped her MetroCard through the reader on the turnstile but not in the swift assured motion of the other riders. “Please swipe again,” it prompted, which she did and luckily this time her performance was considered acceptable and she was allowed to pass.
    She joined the throng on the platform waiting for the train and wondered again why she did this, why she kept putting herself out there. She was not a confident performer, her teachers always instructing her to project, not to hug her body, to throw back her shoulders, to find her voice in her stomach or one of a thousand other tried and tested tricks of the trade, all of which momentarily sufficed to fool her teachers into thinking they had imparted some wisdom that would help a difficult project. But when she returned to that exercise the next day or week or month, she would fall back on her reticence and again her teachers would wonder whether they needed to have the talk with her, the talk where they would confide that not everyone is suited for the life theatrical.
    Her train arrived and she