Jane Actually

seeing the death of Austen scholarship, and I think that a very sad thing.
    For in future when a question arises as to an incident in Miss Austen’s life, we need merely ask her the question and her answer will settle the matter. We need no longer scour the letters of Cassandra or Jane. We need no longer look at a registrar’s records to see who has been born or married or died on such and such a date. We need no longer search the periodicals of the day to see what news Miss Austen had just read. We can simply ask her.
    And by asking her, we need no longer write our learned papers and await their publication in
Persuasions.
We need no longer await the hue and cry caused by promoting this theory or that and then defend those theories before graduate committees or on blogs and forums because any answer Miss Austen provides will be definitive.
    I had never thought of this wrinkle. I’ve always dreamed of asking Jane Austen why she accepted Harris Bigg-Wither in the first place or who was the mystery man from Devon. But I never dreamed that knowing the answer would take all the fun out of it.
    Sadly we may be reduced to nothing more than a fan base. Will the Annual General Meeting become the equivalent of a Star Trek convention where we line up behind a microphone to ask Miss Austen one inane question after another?
    And I can’t see a way out of this dilemma. To ignore Jane Austen as a resource would be unimaginable, but with each answer another graduate student finds his thesis confirmed, denied or made irrelevant.
    Of course I am thrilled beyond words that Jane—I mean Miss Austen, for now that she is among us it seem presumptuous to address her so informally—has regained her voice. To read her completed
Sanditon
is a joy I eagerly await, but I cannot help but mourn the loss of her heretofore essential unknowableness that allowed her to be my best friend. Previously I had no fear whether she was a conservative or a liberal, preferred dogs to cats or thought Benny Hill superior to Monty Python, but now I might learn that she doesn’t share my values and opinions. I may learn that she may think my writings about her an awful cheek and so inaccurate as to be laughable.
    Or I can hope the wisdom she has acquired all these years has led her to a calm acceptance of our interest in her. Perhaps she will choose to keep her life a close secret, just as she did when she titled her first book “By a Lady.” But in this day and age of podcasts, blogs and a 24-hour news cycle, I think that unlikely.
    Jane did not know what to think after reading this obviously heartfelt appeal. Her immediate reaction was to leave a comment saying that she had no intention of denying anyone who wanted to continue studying her life, but then realized that even leaving a comment might be construed as her trying to wield her influence.
    She’d never given much thought that her very existence would threaten the industry that had evolved around her life and novels, and it also made her realize how far she had come from that author who had been content with anonymity.
    In her lifetime, she did not want the notoriety associated with being a woman novelist, but at the same time she wanted the respect due her as an author. Had she lived longer, she would have had to reconcile those two desires. But over the long years of seeing first her fame decline and then slowly rise to heights she could never have imagined, she had come to accept herself as a famous author.
    By now she’d already given several interviews and soon would be going on book tour and doubtless would be answering endless questions about her life and her writing. She had never given a thought that her answers might affect people who had made her life their life’s work.
    And there were many misconceptions and fallacies about her life that she had fully intended to address. Some of the comments her brother Henry made after her death made her sound so good and simple a soul that she could hardly recognize herself. In fact, she would not care to know someone who “never uttered a silly or severe thought” or some such nonsense. Such a person would be entirely too dull. And to be said that she sought neither fame nor profit flew in the face of all those careful calculations she had entered into with Henry, 1 down to the thickness of the paper and the size of the type, so that she might maximize her profits.
    Am I to be kept in silence so the Jane Austen industry might continue