Jane Actually

good painter? Or maybe she got kind of grumpy in her old age?
    She opened the book to the foreword, which surprisingly wasn’t written by a scholar of whom she’d ever heard but by Garrison Keillor, 3 whom she knew from public radio.
    It’s a mystery why we keep reading the works of an English spinster who died almost two hundred years ago and wrote of silly, little things like friendship and marriage and love. She didn’t write about great intrigues or famous people, but she’s never been out of print since 1832 so she must have found a way of finding the importance of silly little things. After all, silly little things remain the same while big important things change all the time.
    I guess it’s similar to the mystery of why anyone would listen to a grumpy Midwesterner talk about silly, little things like marriage and love … and Ole and Lena jokes. To many people my voice on the radio probably seems as dusty and ancient as the words of that good woman from Hampshire, which is probably why the folks at Penguin Books thought I’d be a good choice to write this foreword, a task usually left to even dustier academic voices.
    But as I write this amid all the news about the afterlife being real and provable and the possibility that maybe someday we’ll get to talk to Jane Austen herself …
    “Miss Crawford, you’re up.” A man even younger than herself, holding a clipboard, was standing in front of her. He was smiling and motioning her to follow him, but for a second she found herself rooted to the spot. Reading Keillor’s words suddenly made seem very important the role for which she was auditioning.
    Finally she stood, nodded at the young man and followed him as he led her through a sea of cubicles and then into a corner office.
    . . .
    Jane looked up as this newest applicant entered the office. Despite her initial misgivings, she found herself enjoying the experience of essentially shopping for a new body. She’d never, at least in a modern sense, gone shopping before. She’d lived in a time before ready-made clothes, where usually you picked materials after seeing illustrations showing a dress design, or if you were lucky, dressmaker’s dolls displaying the fashion. Afterward, you either found a woman in the village to make the dress for you, made it yourself or if you could afford it and lived in London or Bath, paid a dressmaker’s shop to make it. But rarely could you try things “off the rack.”
    But now young women were parading before her and she had the luxury of admiring their fashion, their poise and most importantly their looks. In fact she had wanted to select the first applicant, a tall stunning beauty of auburn hair, ample bosom and striking blue eyes—much to the apoplexy of her agent.
    “Jane, you can’t pick her!” Melody said, after the applicant had left.
    “Why not?”
    “She looks nothing like you. She has blue eyes, for Christ’s sake. And she’s stacked and taller than Shaq.” 4
    “And how do you know how I looked?”
    “Your sister’s portrait.”
    Jane groaned silently.
That damn portrait.
She must as a good sister defend Cassandra’s skill as an artist,
but that damn, awful portrait
.
    “It was a sketch, nothing more. Cassie always said she’d …” Jane stopped, realizing that she was whining. “I was considered tall.”
    Melody snorted, which Jane could not hear but suspected. “You were considered tall for a woman in the 1800s. That girl was a gigantor. You can’t just buy the first dress you try on. After all, your public has an image of you …”
    “But I don’t like that image. I don’t want to be a 41-year-old spinster anymore.”
    “You don’t have to be. But you can’t be
Xena,
5
Warrior Princess
either.”
    The reference was lost on Jane but a quick search on YouTube showed her the absurdity of Melody’s comparison, and also showed Jane the absurdity of her preference. So she remained largely noncommittal as the other candidates entered and left, keeping her notes to herself. Then Mary Crawford entered.
    But then she stopped, momentarily ignoring the proffered hand of Mr Pembroke, and instead stared outward through the large windows of Mr Pembroke’s office. Jane too looked out through the windows and saw the breath-taking view toward Central Park and thought how especially wonderful New York City could appear on a bright sunny day. Miss Mary Crawford—and suddenly Jane realized the import of the name—was the first applicant to