Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden Read online

  Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

  JANET TODD is a novelist, biographer, literary critic and internationally renowned scholar, known for her work on women’s writing and feminism. Her most recent books include Don’t You Know There’s a War On?; Jane Austen’s Sanditon; Radiation Diaries; Aphra Behn: A Secret Life; and A Man of Genius. She has published biographies and critical work on many authors, including Jane Austen, Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters, Mary (Shelley) and Fanny, and her Irish pupil, Lady Mount Cashell.

  Born in Wales, Janet Todd grew up in Britain, Bermuda and Ceylon/Sri Lanka and has worked at schools and universities in Ghana, Puerto Rico, India, the US (Douglass College, Rutgers and Florida), Scotland (Glasgow, Aberdeen) and England (Cambridge, UEA). A former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and Emerita Professor at the University of Aberdeen, she is now an Honorary Fellow of Newnham College.

  Praise for Janet Todd’s previous works

  Don’t You Know There’s a War On?

  “Lush prose … this smouldering novel is a dark and strangely disquieting pleasure.” Times Literary Supplement

  “I love this powerful, brilliant evocation of post WWII life. Strongly recommended.” Miriam Margolyes

  Radiation Diaries: Cancer, Memory and Fragments of a Life in Words

  “Janet Todd’s pain-filled interweaving of life and literature is a good book written against the odds – it is frank, wry and unexpectedly heartening.” Hilary Mantel

  “A stunningly good, tight, intelligent, truthful book and one of the most touching love letters to literature I have ever read. Ah, so that’s why we write, I thought.” Maggie Gee

  “I read it avidly, unable to stop. I love the voice, especially the tension between restraint and candour in its brevities – and yet endearingly warm and honest. It’s an original voice and utterly convincing in its blend of confession, quirkiness, humour, intimacy. It’s nothing short of a literary masterpiece, inventing a genre. A delight too is the embeddedness of books in the character of a lifelong reader; it is fascinating to learn of Todd’s fascinating variegated past. How gallant (like the verbal gallop against mortality at the close of The Waves).” Lyndall Gordon

  A Man of Genius

  “Strange and haunting, a gothic novel with a modern consciousness.” Philippa Gregory

  “A quirky, darkly mischievous novel about love, obsession and the burden of charisma, played out against the backdrop of Venice’s watery, decadent glory.” Sarah Dunant

  “A mesmerizing story of love and obsession: dark and utterly compelling.” Natasha Solomons

  “Intriguing and entertaining; clever, beguiling.” Salley Vickers

  “A real knack for language with some jaw-droppingly luscious dialogue. I can see the author’s pedigree in the story, style, and substance of the book. It seems like a wonderful sleeper: think Elegance of the Hedgehog.” Geoffrey Jennings, Rainy Day Books

  “A haunting, sophisticated story about a woman slowly discovering the truth about herself and the elusive, possibly illusive, nature of genius.” Sunday Times

  “Mesmerizing, haunting pages from a gothic-driven imagination.” Times Literary Supplement

  “Gripping, original, with abundant thrills, spills and revelations.”

  The Lady

  Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

  “Genuinely original.” Antonia Fraser, The Times

  “Janet Todd has a good ear for tone and a deep understanding.” Emma Donoghue

  “Todd is one of the foremost feminist literary historians writing in this country. She has devoted her literary career to recovering the lives and works of women writers overlooked and disparaged by generations of male literary scholars.” Independent on Sunday

  “Thorough and stimulating.” Maureen Duffy, Literary Review

  “Todd has an enjoyably satirical style; she writes with shrewdness, humour and compassion.” Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times

  “A rip-roaring read.” Michele Roberts, Sunday Times

  “A convincing and entertaining path through Behn’s life in the vivid context of her times … an effective mixture of historical research, literary criticism and fiction that brings us as close as we may ever get to the truth of this enterprising and enigmatic literary figure.” Shelf Awareness

  “A brisk, entertaining, and richly detailed portrait of a unique woman and her era.” Kirkus

  “Janet Todd guides us with unfailing buoyancy and a wit all her own through the intricacies of Restoration theatre and politics. [Behn’s] epitaph seems to suggest her wit is buried with her. Not at all; it is now wondrously resurrected.” Evening Standard

  Jane Austen

  “Monumental, powerful, learned … sets the standard.” Frank Kermode, London Review of Books

  “Essential for anyone with a serious interest in Austen … rendered with razor-sharp clarity for a modern audience – exceptionally useful.” Duncan Wu, Raymond Wagner Professor in Literary Studies, Georgetown University

  “Intelligent and accessible.” Times Literary Supplement “Easy to read and engaging; excellent on Austen’s work.” Choice

  “Janet Todd is one of the foremost feminist literary historians writing now.” Lisa Jardine, Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies, Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University of London, Independent on Sunday

  Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle; Mary Wollstonecraft

  “Todd is an extraordinary researcher and sophisticated critic. This biography conjures a vivid sense of a revolutionary and a woman, and offers precise insights into the progress of one writer’s life.” Ruminator

  “A juicy portrait, reconstructed with insight and wit.” Entertainment Weekly

  “Terrific insight … Todd soundly and generously reimagines women’s lives.” Publishers’ Weekly (Starred)

  “Janet Todd brilliantly captures the absurdity in Wollstonecraft while defending the view that her life was both important and revolutionary. Like Virginia Woolf, Todd interprets this life as a daring experiment. Wollstonecraft is all but resurrected in Janet Todd’s distinguished book: brave, reckless and wide open to life. Virginia Woolf claimed for Wollstonecraft a special kind of immortality. Janet Todd has strengthened the case.” Ruth Scurr, The Times

  “The great strength of Janet Todd’s biography lies in her willingness to unpick the feminist frame on which earlier lives of Wollstonecraft were stretched to fit.” Kathryn Hughes, Literary Review

  “Janet Todd, a feminist, has done ground-breaking scholarship on women writers. Her work reads quickly and lightly … Even Todd’s throwaway lines are steeped in learning and observation. Todd has documented so ably the daring attempt of a woman to write, both for her daily bread and for immortal fame.” Ruth Perry, MIT, Women’s Review of Books

  Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

  A Novel with Pictures

  Janet Todd

  Fentum Press

  Fentum Press, London

  Sold and distributed by Global Book Sales/Macmillan Distribution and in North America by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, Inc. part of the Ingram Content Group.

  Copyright © 2021 Janet Todd

  Janet Todd asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN (paperback) 978-1-909572-270

  Ebook: 978-1-909572-28-7

  Typeset in Fournier by Patty Rennie

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Ltd

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval syst
em, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  For Miriam

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Four

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part Five

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Part One

  1

  It is a truth universally, begins Jane Austen …

  Shhh, says Fran, finger on lips. Not subtle. Money and sex. How many versions before you settled on that flirtatious opening?

  The amazing Agafia Lykova, reclusive and garrulous, lives most of her life alone in the wilderness of the Siberian Taiga. The last survivor of a family of Old Believers who fled Stalin’s persecutions in 1936, Agafia traps animals and fish and grows potatoes. In a lean year, like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, she eats her leather shoes. Excluding the shoes, the diet’s good – in her seventies she retains her teeth, though filed down from cracking nuts. Now a world-famous hermit, she receives numerous letters and presents. The donated modern food may cause tooth decay.

  Fran smiles with Jane Austen over this account. I know, she says, the material is so intense we should focus on trifles. Those shoes, the fan letters.

  Nothing is trifling in the life of the isolate, the miraculous Agafia Lykova.

  Nor in the life of Jane Austen. Both are celebrities.

  I am a fridge magnet, remarks Jane Austen. Miss Lykova, I believe, is on YouTube.

  Fran looks through her kitchen window. Bare trees and flat, sodden, sewage-coloured February fields below a greyish sky. If the sky came lower – moist, cold and alive – would it squash the mushroom-smelling earth, leave a slug-trail? I may have to learn to live with people before it’s too late, she thinks.

  You’d be happier if you had work, observes Jane Austen. Your Agafia’s busy fishing, digging and praying. You should take up intricate sewing.

  Men don’t sew.

  Men have guns, says Jane Austen (contrary to admiring views, she’s not always in universal touch), they get up with the lark to shoot things.

  She slides behind the great fireplace as Annie Klein ducks her head to negotiate the lintel at the foot of the staircase.

  Annie suspects Jane Austen of haunting her friend.

  Not quite, Fran would say if they discussed the matter. The woman’s there, often uninvited, an intruder. Like a dream she ambles in, sits down and won’t leave despite a batting of eyelids. Settling where a shadow should be.

  Is Fran grateful? Dickens’s Mrs Blimber of Dombey and Son said, if she could have known Cicero, she’d have died contented. Sometimes Fran resents her Author muttering in her ear.

  Mind’s ear, Annie might have said.

  ‘The fact is you’re too isolated here now you’ve retired. Wifi and IT gadgets aren’t company. You’ll get weird if you stay much longer. Well, weirder.’

  Though mid-morning, Annie hasn’t yet had coffee; it makes her a little severe.

  ‘I know,’ says Fran, unable to repress a smile. She’s pleased when someone troubles to analyse her.

  ‘Dr Johnson thought solitude and idleness roads to madness.’

  ‘Can’t do idleness,’ grins Fran, fingering the screwdriver in the drooping front pocket of her jumpsuit. She stares at the drizzle making pointillism on the small-paned windows, then swivels her eyes towards thin cracks in the bulging plaster round the wood frames.

  Mice scamper along private alleyways.

  To prevent Annie noticing, she speaks loudly. ‘I’m planning to write now I’ve time. Something oblique, a little personal.’

  ‘Writing in solitude’s as mad as talking to yourself. Virginia Woolf’s room of her own was in a big family house. You’ll never have a writing group out here. You haven’t even joined a book club.’

  Fran avoids looking at Jane Austen, who, she guesses, now smirks by the window. She hears the Author saying (for the umpteenth time) that she never wrote alone, someone was always at home to applaud a sentence, laugh at a witticism. Women do not need rooms of their own, she rumbles on – we’re not all in Bloomsbury. We were a large, lively family, extra young people about, father’s pupils, friends, relations.

  Just Mum, Dad and Me, sighs Fran. But we were content.

  What, thinks Annie, can Fran write about? She has no fierceness about lost life. Those dear dull parents in their warm little bungalow? Then she recalls drowned Andrew.

  Fran’s an uneasy hostess, forgetting to lay out flannels and bath towels, arrange flowers by the guest bed, but she loves having Annie in the cottage. Annie colours in outlines.

  The women sit on Arts-and-Craft chairs with pierced-heart backs and studded brown seats. Annie found them in an auction – Fran wouldn’t know an Arts-and-Craft chair from a Windsor. On the deal table remains of a pheasant stuffed with Boursin cheese, accompanied by roasted potatoes, parsnips, carrots and steamed purple-flowering broccoli.

  Fran gazes idly at a china pig with a trapdoor in its back, half ornament, half piggybank. Incongruous in the sprawling fireplace, it gleams pinkly next to a child’s blue clay owl called Plop: an haphazard shaft of sun catches it between showers.

  The cottage meal isn’t the imaginative one Annie concocts in her better lighted Cambridge kitchen; still, though conventional, it’s good. Waitrose has responded to the new estate (built on a flood plain) by providing prettily illustrated dinners for two or four. Among them plucked, prepared pheasant. The Boursin cheese is Annie’s touch.

  Fran had forgotten just how much washing-up this avatar of Christmas dinner causes. Thankfully she’s not made her lemon surprise pudding with beaten egg whites. More intricate mess with sticky prongs as well as splattered counter. A cold shop-bought tart sits in the kitchen, pulling pheasant smells into its industrial pastry.

  *

  She and Annie carry the dirty plates the few steps towards the sink. It’s under the slanting roof that once reached the ground against the cold and meanness of English peasant winters. Four hungry families inhabited the cottage then.

  ‘It’s a comfortable place, not saying,’ Annie continues when the tart has dissolved its sweetness in their mouths. It’s flowing amiably down to inhabit the stomach, delivering the sugar-high mothers dread in small unrestrained children. The homemade lemon pudding would have been tastier, yet, once en route through tubes, where’s the difference? ‘But Norfolk’s remote. Suffolk’s another thing, quaint second homes and all that. But just here, it’s, well, very rural. Your garden’s fine,’ she adds, aware of the labour Fran puts in planting bulbs and bare tree roots in the unaccommodating soil. ‘Still I prefer the hustling, bustling streets. You should too. A retreat’s good but not all the time, not so you become too moved by yourself and trees – and talk too often to your Author.’

  Fran reddens. Annie’s been emboldened by speaking of Fran to Rachel, an American attuned to therapy trends: knowing nothing of Fran, Rachel said ‘borderline’, making Annie laugh.

  2

  ‘It’s my talk of Agafia that’s brought this on, ye
s?’ says Fran as Annie returns from the bar of the Three Geese with a further two glasses of house white. They should be drinking gin, but Fran recoils at the price. ‘One can live alone without finding oneself lonely.’

  ‘Naturally.’ Annie winces at the pronoun. She’d been mocked as bourgeois and (paradoxically) an echo of that fossil Prince Charles for using it in a lecture at an ex-poly. Now she embraces ungrammatical obscenity while feeling the impatience of a convert. ‘Agafia got attuned to isolation early on. She gave it a shape. You said she trapped fish and skinned rabbits. Dirty but probably satisfying.’

  ‘I don’t miss teaching,’ says Fran. ‘It’s entertainment now. “We love Colin Firth”.’

  Annie thanks her stars she’s never had to say, ‘I work on Jane Austen’, then meet the lit-up face of a visiting wife – ‘Oh, Mr Darcy!’ She smiles benignly at her friend.

  ‘But perhaps I wanted a little chandelier swagger in my life.’

  Fran hesitates, ‘I wish I hadn’t had to work so hard for everything. Much nicer to get it through luck.’

  Annie scowls. Fran thinks her lucky, just like her classmates used to do – famous father and posh house – she knows otherwise. ‘I’ve had to persevere for …’

  But Fran’s stopped listening. She doesn’t need to hear Annie say again how little she’s been rewarded.

  ‘… though I’ve never really made it. Never been in those clubby societies like Apostles, British Academy, never had a CBE or whatever, never had an Honorary …’ She’s tangling in memories of Zach Klein.

  ‘Nobody cares a damn in South Norfolk.’

  Alan Partridge’s Norfolk is ‘the Wales of the East’.

  ‘You’ll be retired soon. A Senior Railcard takes you anywhere.’

  Old age is an equalizer, Fran means. It can, should they choose, be daisy-time together.

  Jane Austen sits in a nook. I persevered, she remarks.