Jane Actually

especially one long dead, should think seriously before turning down any offer from a publisher, even if it be for completing a book that one had long ago abandoned. After all, the passage of time, circumstances and not least the loss of one’s body, affords a new perspective.
    These thoughts compelled Jane to look again at her agent’s email conveying the offer from her publisher regarding
The Watsons
. They appeared quite interested that she complete her fragment of not quite 18,000 words, but in all honesty she had given it little thought over the years. She had re-read it since the advent of the AfterNet, of course, and she knew the general opinion of it, that she had abandoned it because it was “too close to home.”
    She pondered the phrase. It was true that the death of her father and the decline of her family’s fortunes uncomfortably paralleled the plot, but her memory was that the book simply wasn’t going where she wanted. With herself, her mother and sister moving so frequently, the book simply was passed over, especially after she returned her attention to
Elinor and Marianne.
1
    Of course, there were still parts of
The Watsons
to recommend. Most readers seemed to enjoy Emma’s dance with—
oh, what was the little boy’s name?
Jane was forced to Google her own book and found the answer—
Charles Blake!
—at the
Republic of Pemberley.
    She was a little embarrassed at not being able to recall his name.
No one will credit me if I can’t remember the names of my characters.
    Jane was also leery of finishing the book because others had already attempted it, including her niece Catherine, taking rather more liberties than she ought.
    I should say no, but if a year from now I am still unable to think of some new project, perhaps I might be desperate enough to attempt it.
    She sighed, inaudibly of course, which was never really as satisfying. The cold fear that she still might be unable to write a year from now was too awful to comprehend.
    Best to leave some options open
, she thought, and composed a reply to her agent:
    Dear Melody,
    I thank you for conveying this offer from our publisher, but after careful consideration
    She stopped and looked at what she’d written, deleted it and instead wrote:
    Melody,
    Thanks for the heads up about the offer, but I don’t think I want to revisit The Watsons right now. I keep saying I should write something that’s relevant today. However, I don’t want to say no, as I am sure you’d advise. Could you say that Sanditon has all my attention for the moment?
    Jane
    She hit send and hoped Melody would not be jarred by the tone of her reply, but now was as good a time as any to leave the Regency behind. Having spent nearly a decade online, her casual “speech” had evolved, but into what she could not say. Even before the AfterNet made it easy for her to read, she had absorbed what she could of the current idiom by looking over the shoulders of people reading books, magazines and newspapers. Not until the discovery of the afterlife, however, was it possible for her to employ any of what she had learned. And thus it was that her speech was a mixture of the here and now and the past and forgotten.
    When she was appearing before the identity committee, she decided, and had been advised, not to retreat to the speech patterns of her corporeal existence—“It will just sound too precious,” Melody told her—but to adopt a more modern tone.
    She had to avoid sounding too modern, however. Those anticipating conversation with Jane Austen would be confused if she employed the phrase “friends with benefits” or remarked on a “cringeworthy” performance on
Strictly Come Dancing.
So she must adopt a style that allowed her to speak with her natural—well, she must own up to it and call it sarcasm—but neither sound too modern nor too quaint. But with her very few close friends, such as Melody, she might relax her caution, although Jane already regretted the “heads up.”
    For the moment, however, she did not regret rejecting the proposal.
I must write something new, damn it! I don’t want to be the grande dame of English letters forever.
    She looked around guiltily, both embarrassed and amused by her outburst, but of course no one in the Starbucks at 63rd and Broadway in Manhattan had heard her. After all, she had no body, no voice, no physical presence. She was just one of the—she looked at the counter on the AfterNet terminal—14 disembodied people