Writing Jane Austen (10 page)

Written along the side of the top deck of the bus in a flowing, ornate script were the words
The Jane Austen Bath Bus Tour
. Georgina winced. This was a conspicuous bus, shrieking, “Tourist!” at every passing pedestrian and car. So what? Wasn’t she, Georgina, a tourist? With one foot on the platform, Georgina hesitated. A young woman stood there, waiting to take her money, frizzy permed curls
standing out from her head and an impatient expression. “Well, are you coming or aren’t you?”

“I was really waiting for the other bus, the red bus. The general tour.”

“This one’s much more interesting. We visit all the places where Jane Austen and her family lived, and all the places mentioned in the novels. You get all the main sights as well as a live commentary, so it’s better value.”

Georgina paid her ten pounds, took the gaily coloured map which came with the ticket and hesitated—inside, downstairs and warm, or up to the top deck, open, windy, but better views?

She tied her scarf more firmly around her neck and went upstairs. There was a vacant seat at the front, and she sat there, perched on high, looking down on to the throng of shoppers. This was presumably the main drag, there were all the usual high-street shops on either side, although classy ones, no pound shops here. A large bookstore with a big window display. Books by Jane Austen, announcing a wonderful new sequel to
Pride and Prejudice: Mr. Darcy’s Desire
by Marlena Crawford. Georgina wondered cynically how much her publisher had paid for the window display and the words, written in huge scrolling letters across the window, “Jane Austen comes back to life in this delightful continuation of Mr. Darcy’s story.”

This time next year, Dan Vesey would be buying window space.
Love and Friendship
would be on sale in every bookstore in Bath. Assuming it was written. A new manuscript by Jane Austen, penned in her own hand, even if it were only a few pages, would be headline news for booksellers. The thought depressed her, and she sank deeper into her seat.

On the other side of the aisle sat a couple wrapped up as though the bus journey was taking them on a tour of the Arctic, and polar bears, not Regency frills, were to be the photo opportunity of the day. They were in their forties, the man tall and thin and lugubrious,
the woman with a discontented expression on her beautifully made up face under a furry hat.

“Look at that,” the woman said, gesturing at the window display. “More trash, for God’s sake. There’s no end to it.”

“The sequels are tiresome, but it doesn’t detract from Miss Austen’s works.” The man spoke with a foreign accent. Russian? Polish? His voice was weary, it sounded like an old argument.

The woman tucked her arm into his and smiled at him, a smile of such pure love and affection that it made Georgina blink.

“I’m sorry, Igor, it’s your birthday treat, I promised I wouldn’t make any sour remarks. It’s just beyond me that when you’ve got Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Chekhov and a whole heap more, you’re crazy about Jane Austen.”

“As you have often said.”

Russian, then. Georgina was intrigued. She looked out to the other side, not wanting to be too obviously eavesdropping, but they had lapsed into silence.

Another pair, two American women, talking in loud, excited voices, were taking their places in the seats behind. The bus made revving noises, and the loudspeaker, placed uncomfortably close to Georgina’s seat, crackled into life. The bus began to move away, and then juddered to a halt. Feet clattered up the steps, and two young people emerged on to the top deck, both dressed from head to foot in black. Silver nose studs, heavy boots, spiky hair; they reminded Georgina of Maud, but without her style, and with less attention to personal hygiene.

The woman who’d given Georgina her ticket followed them up the step, a mike in her hand. “Hi, I’m Susie, and I’m your guide for today.”

“Hi,” the girl said to Susie. “I’m Dot, this is Rodney.” They smiled at the others, who didn’t seem keen to respond. Georgina, thinking of Maud, smiled back.

Dot was still talking. “Rodney and I, we’re not a couple, Rodney isn’t into girls, he doesn’t really do humans, hamsters are his thing, anyhow, we’re both Jane Austen addicts, I’ve watched
Pride and Prejudice
more than forty times. Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Susie, with a civil glare and a clearing of her throat, was waiting to speak.

“This is Milsom Street. We have to turn left here, as the rest of the street is a pedestrian zone. It runs all the way down to the Pump Room. In
Northanger Abbey,
Catherine and Isabella walked up here. In
Persuasion,
this is the street where Anne Elliot walks with Admiral Croft and they look at the painting of a ship in the window. In Jane Austen’s day this was the most fashionable street for shops, and it is where Jane Austen and her characters would have come for mantua makers, milliners and to buy ribbons to trim their gowns.”

The bus swung into Lower Borough Walls. “We shall be crossing Pulteney Bridge, observe the shops on either side, this is the only bridge in England with shops on it. We are approaching Laura Place, where—”

Excited American voices broke out behind Gina. “Where our cousins, Lady Dalrymple and Miss Carteret, live,” they exclaimed and then broke into delighted laughter.

Cousins to a Lady Dalrymple? Odd for a couple whose accents placed them somewhere in Texas.

As the bus halted at the traffic lights, Georgina was puzzled by the voices coming from the rear of the minibus. Did they have a radio? Were they listening to something on an iPod with the volume turned up?

She turned round to look and was rewarded by a toothy smile from Dot. “Want to watch?” the girl said, holding up a portable DVD player.

Watch what?

“We’re playing
Pride and Prejudice
. To put us in the mood,” the
girl went on. “Colin Firth, great, I just die when I see him dive into the lake.”

The Russian, alerted by the magic words
Pride and Prejudice,
had also swung round. “That scene is entirely made up,” he said with severity. “It is not in the book. It is an invention, an unnecessary and inappropriate addition by the scriptwriter, wanting to sex up the book for television.”

“No need to sex it up with Colin Firth in that shirt and those breeches, he’s hot,” said the girl. Rodney, who seemed the silent sort, nodded and muttered, “Dead sexy.”

“Don’t you prefer the book?” said the Russian.

“Never read it, and don’t want to,” said Dot. “Haven’t got time for that, and reading’s passé, no one reads these days, books and all that are finished.”

Great Pulteney Street was wide and impressive, with more big Georgian terraced houses. Georgina caught glimpses of first-floor drawing rooms, with chandeliers, silk drapes, panelled walls, paintings.

“In Regency times, when people came to Bath to take the waters, or for the season, they rented houses, and most of these houses would have been rental properties. By Jane Austen’s day, Bath was no longer as fashionable as it had been in the eighteenth century, and it was a place where widows and dowagers and genteel families without a great deal of money came to live.”

Snatches of dialogue came from the back seats, and Susie gave the youngsters a cold look. “Perhaps you could keep the volume down,” she said, “if you aren’t interested in what I have to say.”

“Righto,” said Dot obligingly. “Can’t say I want to listen to stuff about houses. We’ll plug in the earphones, okay?”

“It was a hierarchical society, with clear divisions of class, wealth and status,” Susie continued.

“Class,” the Russian said appreciatively. “English writers always
write about class. There are all the conflicts, all the unease, all the distinctions that make for substance in a novel.”

Georgina could agree with that. “That’s why this fascination with Jane Austen is so damaging, people harking back to a time when people were seriously oppressed, and pretending it was some kind of golden age.”

The two American women, who had been listening with rapt attention to Susie’s every word, smiling at every mention of a character or place or situation in
Emma,
overheard Georgina’s remark, and were voluble in their disagreement.

“Austen makes fun of snobbery, she had no time for it, look how she treats Emma!”

The Russian joined in the discussion with enthusiasm. Georgina fixed her gaze on the passing scene, ears pinned back to eavesdrop on her fellow passengers’ conversation. What was it about Jane Austen and her novels that so fascinated a diverse group of people like this?

“Jane Austen came to Bath with her family in 1799, and then again in 1801. She didn’t like Bath, as we can tell from Anne Elliot’s reluctance to come here in
Persuasion,
where she writes of its heat and glaring pavements. In fact, so shocked was Jane when she heard that the family were relocating to Bath from the country, that she fainted clean away.”

“I do not believe that,” said the Russian, speaking, it seemed, to himself. “From her letters it is obvious that she relished life in London, she was no country recluse, favouring the silence and isolation of village life.”

“That’s all very well,” said one of the Texans. “But how do you account for her fallow time all those years when she was living in Bath and Southampton? Just
Lady Susan
and
The Watsons,
and she didn’t get far with them. Doesn’t that speak of unhappiness?”

“Perhaps she was occupied with other matters,” said the Russian,
turning his head to address the Americans. “So taken up with the bustle of life that she had no time for writing. Perhaps she was happy, and happiness isn’t always conducive to artistic creation. Many of my countrymen are naturally of a melancholic and unhappy nature, and from this springs our great literature.”

“Where are you from?” said the deeper-voiced of the two Americans.

“Now I live in England, I am a citizen here, but I am Russian.”

“And you’re an Austen fan? That’s wonderful. We’ve come all the way from Langtry in Texas to visit all the places associated with Austen.”

Her friend chipped in. “Anne Elliot didn’t want to come to Bath, but it was here she got together with Captain Wentworth.”

“This is symbolic, I think,” said the Russian, with eager interest. “While she is in the country she is static, her life is not in movement. When she is shaken out of herself, when she comes to the city, then life begins anew for her.”

“I reckon Austen just loved the countryside,” insisted Deep Voice. “Look at how well she describes it, the muddy walks that Lizzy takes, the beautiful landscapes where the Dashwoods live, and of course the beauties of Pemberley and Derbyshire.”

Georgina listened with incredulity as the talk flowed to and fro, the three of them talking about these people, presumably characters in the novels, as though they were real people. She exchanged glances with the Russian’s companion, who shrugged and cast her eyes upwards.

The bus turned into North Parade and then right into Pierrepont Street. Georgina recognized it as the street she had walked along from the station before she’d started the endless ascent towards Bartlett Street. “You can go much higher,” Bel had told her. “Lansdown Crescent and then up to Sion Hill, you have to go there, for a wonderful view of Bath spread out beneath you.”

The bus was pulling in. “This is where you get off for the Pump Room and the Abbey,” Susie said. “The next bus will be along in two hours.”

The Russian and his companion rose and descended, followed by the Americans. Georgina saw them crossing in front of the bus, three of them deep in conversation, one separate and uninterested. The Americans weren’t as she’d pictured them, middle-aged, complacent. They were younger, an incongruous pair, one tall and thin with short hair and large, fashionable glasses, the other short and plump in an unflattering raincoat, with a green Tyrolean hat squashed on untidy fair hair.

Dan’s potential readership, Georgina said to herself. Her potential readers. Or perhaps not. If they were that fanatical, they might confine themselves to the original texts, and disdain anything not written by Jane Austen herself.

Had anyone ever sat and chewed over her heroine, Magdalene Crib? These people were talking about Jane Austen’s characters as though they were old friends. Friends meant likeable. Magdalene wasn’t likeable.

The thought popped into Georgina’s head and surprised her. She hadn’t wanted Magdalene to be likeable. What chance had any woman to be likeable when she’d had to endure such a wretched life?

Susie, who had been silent for a while, spoke again. “The Theatre Royal opened its doors on this site in 1805 and Jane Austen herself would certainly have seen performances here. She loved the theatre, as her biographies and letters testify. Showing this week is a play about Jane Austen,
Dear Jane,
a dialogue between herself as a ghost and her brother Charles, the admiral. This is part of its pre-London run, where it will open in three weeks’ time. Tickets are available at the box office, but hurry if you want to go, as performances are selling out fast. We come now to Queen Square where Jane Austen
stayed, at Number Thirteen, in 1799, and then we proceed up Gay Street where she lodged for a while at Number Twenty-five, on our right.

“We have reached The Circus. We stop here to allow you to leave the tour and visit the Royal Crescent, especially Number One Royal Crescent, a museum of Georgian life, and to go along the Broad Walk, marked on your map, where romance bloomed for Anne and Captain Wentworth. Once again, the next bus will pick up in two hours.”

Georgina was almost tempted to get off, not least to get away from Susie’s irritating flow of information about Jane Austen, which was factual, and about her characters, which was absurd.

Of course literary tours were all the rage. She had a friend who’d been on a Dracula tour recently, complete with free fangs, and London was full of Dickens and Sherlock Holmes tours, alongside Jack the Ripper walks and an evening with Samuel Pepys. How people loved to personalize and emotionalize fictive and historical characters—a distortion that conflicted with reality and was simply an indulgence.