First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen Read online

  Sophie smiled in spite of herself—much as she hated to admit it, Eric had a point. She recalled one doe-eyed girl lurking at the edge of her circle of literary friends in the Bear. From her few intrusions into the conversation it seemed that she thought Mr. Darcy’s principal character trait was the “adorable” way his wet hair hung across his forehead.

  “Now,” said Eric, “if you’re walking back into Oxford, I think I’ll join you. We can keep talking about Jane Austen if you like.” He stood up without brushing the dirt and grass from his pants and slipped his book into his pocket.

  “Do you promise not to imitate my voice?” said Sophie.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think Mansfield Park isn’t properly appreciated by the establishment,” said Sophie, doing her best impersonation of his impersonation.

  “That was you?”

  She only scowled in response.

  “Well, come on,” said Eric, “it’s such a clichéd line—all that stuff about Mansfield Park not being appreciated. It may not make as good a movie as some of the others, but of course it’s appreciated.”

  “Even if you were right, that’s entirely beside the point.”

  “And what is the point?”

  “That you’re an ass,” said Sophie.

  “Yes, but wouldn’t talking to me be more interesting than walking alone?”

  She stared at him, detecting an intensity in his eyes that belied his relaxed attitude. Finally she sighed and said, “Marginally.”

  “Great,” said Eric, starting toward Oxford. She wasn’t sure how it happened, but by the time they reached the edge of Port Meadow, they were deep in conversation about the youthful style of Northanger Abbey.

  “Listen, tomorrow’s Saturday—I thought I might drive down to Steventon,” said Eric at a lull in the conversation. “You want to come?” Sophie had, in fact, never been to Steventon, the village in Hampshire where Jane Austen had spent the first twenty-five years of her life and had written the first drafts of three of her novels. She would have loved to go, but not with him, and in any case she couldn’t help laughing at his transparency.

  “Does that work?” she asked.

  “Does what work?”

  “That ploy. You find out a girl’s favorite author and then offer to drive her to Jane Austen’s birthplace, or George Orwell’s gravesite, or Charles Dickens’s favorite pub.”

  “I don’t like Dickens.”

  “How can you not like Dickens?”

  “All that poverty. It depresses me. At least Austen’s heroines end up in nice big houses.”

  “Setting aside the fact that I find you disagreeable,” said Sophie, “the truth is I have plans tomorrow.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you find me disagreeable,” said Eric.

  “Then how do you think I find you?”

  “I think you’re intrigued by me—and even though I’m rude and generally unpolished, you think you might have finally met someone who appreciates Jane Austen as much as you do.”

  “When I heard you the other night, my first impression was that you were a prat,” said Sophie, annoyed that he had so accurately guessed what she was thinking. She had dated Clifton for two years and he never knew what she was thinking. This guy had known her for twenty minutes and he could read her like a book. It was unnerving.

  “First impressions can be misleading,” said Eric. “Just ask Eliza Bennet. Come to Steventon with me.”

  “I have plans.”

  “What plans?”

  “I have to go home for the weekend. My mother’s having a . . . thing.”

  “A thing?”

  “A garden thing,” said Sophie. “It’s a sculpture show. My mother is a bit obsessive about her garden. She thinks it’s the finest in Oxfordshire.”

  “What sort of things does she grow?”

  “Latin things,” she said. “English names aren’t good enough for my mother. Everything is Latin.” She hadn’t meant to sound quite so harsh. Sophie actually liked her mother’s use of Latin—it reminded her of her Uncle Bertram reading Horace to help her fall asleep when she was a girl.

  “I take it you’re not a gardener,” said Eric.

  “I like to read in the garden,” said Sophie, “and I can tell a flower from a shrubbery and a shrubbery from a tree, but my thumb has always been distinctly black.”

  “And your father?”

  “What about my father?”

  “What sort of chap is he?” asked Eric.

  “Oh, really, don’t use the word ‘chap.’ You’re American; don’t try to pretend otherwise.”

  “Sorry, what sort of bloke is he?”

  Sophie rolled her eyes. “He likes to shoot things. They’re quite the pair, my parents. Mother only wants to grow things and Father only wants to kill them.”

  “Sounds like you don’t like them very much.”

  “Mother and I get on well enough,” she said. “She’s not much of a reader, but we like to sit in the kitchen and talk all morning over coffee. I don’t get to do that as often as I used to.” It suddenly struck Sophie that, in spite of her apathy about her mother’s garden, she was really looking forward to the morning after the sculpture show, when she and her mother could have one of their long relaxing talks.

  “So it’s your father you don’t like. Is he just annoying or is it something worse?”

  Eric’s question cut a little too close to the bone, so she turned the conversation on him.

  “What about you? Are you on one of those American university study abroad programs?” she asked.

  “Hardly,” he said. “I’m a little old for that.” He explained that after getting his M.A. he had taught at Berkeley for two years but was now between jobs, so he was taking a year off, hitchhiking across Europe, and reading great books in beautiful places. “You know, Proust in Paris, Dante in Florence, and Jane Austen in the English countryside. I suppose you think that sounds a bit pompous.”

  “I think it sounds wonderful,” said Sophie, who could think of no better way to spend a year. “But, if you’re hitchhiking, how were you going to drive me to Steventon?”

  “Good question,” said Eric. They had reached Osney Lock. He leaned against the white metal railing that separated the nineteenth-century lock, with its hand-cranked wooden gates, from the narrow width of the path. They stood watching as the water pouring into the lock slowly raised up a long, narrow canal boat. Sophie loved the locks and almost always stopped to watch the traffic whenever she passed one.

  “I would have found someone to loan me a car,” Eric said as the boatman cranked open the upstream gates and the boat began to move slowly away. “I’m very persuasive.”

  She wasn’t quite sure how he had done it, since she had thought they were both watching the canal boat, but suddenly she found him looking directly into her eyes and she felt her knees go weak. The desperation and need for approval were gone, replaced by a confidence that both frightened her and drew her in. She turned away and continued down the path toward Oxford, convinced now that he could, indeed, be very persuasive. She resolved not to look into those eyes again.

  “I don’t get along with my father, either,” he said, falling back into step with her.

  “I’m shocked,” said Sophie. “I mean, unkempt and unemployed—he should be so proud.”

  “Sarcasm!” said Eric. “Bully for you.”

  Perhaps she was being too harsh—after all, they had been having a pleasant conversation—but the way he’d gazed into her eyes had really thrown her. “I’m sorry,” she said, more gently. “Tell me about your father.”

  “I’d rather talk about yours,” he said. “I look forward to meeting him.”

  “Oh, I hardly think that’s going to happen.”

  “You never know.”

  “Actually, I do know
. You don’t have a job, you don’t cut your hair, and you love books. You represent everything my father abhors.”

  “You’ve got to introduce us. I could learn to shoot things.”

  “I don’t think arming you is a very good idea,” said Sophie.

  “Well, even unarmed, I’m sure he’d find me delightful.”

  “You have an awfully high opinion of yourself, don’t you?”

  “Not really,” said Eric. “I mean, not like you do. I’m just American. Maybe we’re better at joking around and having fun.”

  “What makes you think I have a high opinion of myself?”

  “Well, you think you’re better than me, right?”

  Sophie felt chastened. They had arrived at the gentle stone arches of Folly Bridge, and the Oxford traffic was now just ahead of them, at the top of a long flight of stone steps.

  “Look,” said Eric, gently laying a hand on her arm and pulling her to a stop. “I’m not very good at first impressions. But think about it—we both like Jane Austen, we both like walks in the countryside, and I’m an uncouth American who would drive your parents crazy. I’m kind of a catch.”

  She stared at the stones beneath her feet and felt her cheeks turn hot.

  “We don’t have to get married or anything,” said Eric. “I just thought we had a nice walk and it might be fun to hang out or get a coffee or something. I’m only in Oxford for a few more days anyway.”

  Sophie was dying to look at him, to give him her number, even to kiss him on the cheek and walk away with a toss of her hair, but she had never been good at this. And at the moment his insensitive impersonation of her was still pounding in her ears, doing its best to drive away that feeling she had had when he looked into her eyes.

  Still looking down, she pulled away and said, “It was nice to meet you, Eric.” She was halfway up the steep stone steps that led from the riverside to the street when she impulsively turned back and called to him, “It’s Collingwood, by the way. I’m Sophie Collingwood. You can reach me at Christ Church. Just leave a message with the porter.”

  Ten minutes later, Sophie stood in the Upper Library of Christ Church, surrounded by neoclassical bookcases of highly polished oak filled with bindings of leather and vellum and cloth that contained the library’s greatest treasures. Although she worked in a modern office downstairs, this was her favorite room in the college—second among Oxford spaces, in her opinion, only to Duke Humfrey’s Library in the Bodleian. For the past five years, through two degrees, she had come here whenever she needed a place for quiet reflection, a place to center herself before diving back into the raucous world of Oxford. Sophie had finished her master’s degree three weeks ago and was taking the Long Vacation to explore her career options. The college librarian had said she could keep her part-time job until the new term started. So, for a few more weeks, Sophie could stay connected to the world of education—a world she had been immersed in her entire life and where answers always came, if only you looked in the right place. Now she stood alone in the center of this glorious room and wondered if any of her questions—what to do about a man like Eric, how to soften her own sharp edges, and above all what to do with her life—could be answered by the priceless books that surrounded her.

  Hampshire, 1796

  “I FELT THAT, as a young lady whose love of books is equaled only by my own, you would enjoy such a spot,” said Mr. Mansfield.

  “You were, as usual, correct, Mr. Mansfield,” said Jane, running her finger along a row of gleaming leather spines and sighing audibly.

  They stood, by invitation of his lordship, the Earl of Wintringham, in the library of Busbury House. Jane was overwhelmed. The trove of books in her father’s study at Steventon paled in comparison with this treasure house. Shelves seemed to stretch for miles, nearly disappearing overhead.

  “I generally prefer to keep to my own sitting room,” said Mr. Mansfield, “but as you mentioned that you had just finished reading Camilla, I thought you might enjoy looking for new material in his lordship’s collection.”

  “Indeed, Mr. Mansfield,” said Jane, “I feel as if I could spend my life searching for things to read in a library as grand as his lordship’s. I see it was not just the possibility of friendship with young ladies who love novels that drew you to Hampshire. I am surprised you do not live in this room.”

  Though their acquaintance had extended for only two weeks, Jane already felt that she and Mr. Mansfield were old friends. As she had learned at luncheon in the rectory that day when they had first spoken, Rev. Richard Mansfield was the rector of Croft-on-Tees, Yorkshire. When he had entered his ninth decade a few months earlier, his physician had encouraged him to seek warmer climes, so he had hired a curate and decamped to Hampshire, where he was now a guest of Edward Newcombe, the Earl of Wintringham, at Busbury Park. Earlier in his career, Mr. Mansfield had been a schoolteacher, and Robert and Samuel, the two sons of the earl, had come under his tutelage. He had since remained a friend of the family, and was now ensconced in a disused gatehouse at the end of the long east drive.

  “I am asked to dine with his lordship regularly,” said Mr. Mansfield as Jane pulled a lusciously bound copy of Amelia off the shelf, “but I prefer not to stay here. A drafty gatehouse is much more to my liking.”

  “And, I suspect, gives you an independence you might not otherwise enjoy,” said Jane. Mr. Mansfield smiled.

  “Let us say that the conversation at his lordship’s dinner table is not what I have come to expect from you, Miss Austen. It is far too much composed of gossip, especially when his lordship’s sister and her daughters are visiting from London as they are at present.”

  “And you would rather have your intrigue in the form of novels,” said Jane, holding up Amelia and waving it at him, “than in the form of idle speculation by his lordship’s sister concerning her neighbors.”

  “Though you jest, Miss Austen, you are correct. Why, just three nights ago, Lady Mary informed us all with breathless delight that she had heard, while staying with his lordship’s cousin in Kent, that a nearby house had been let to a bachelor with four thousand pounds a year. She told us this as if it were news as momentous as the French Revolution.”

  “But you have said that Lady Mary has daughters,” said Jane, “so to her the news was certainly much more momentous than the beheading of a few thousand French nobles.”

  “I am afraid you have lost me with your youthful logic.”

  “Surely you know, Mr. Mansfield, as any good mother of daughters does, that a bachelor of such means wants nothing more than a wife. No doubt Lady Mary has a high enough opinion of her daughters to believe that he will choose one or the other of them. Marrying one’s daughter to a wealthy man is certainly more important than anything that could happen in France.”

  “I did not think such a thing could happen, Miss Austen,” said Mr. Mansfield with a wink, “but I think it is altogether possible that you have read too many novels.”

  “Well then,” said Jane, “I shall return Amelia to the shelf and borrow this volume of The Spectator to see if, in fact, it ‘tempers my wit with morality.’”

  Summer was in full bloom on the grounds of Busbury Park, and Jane took to making almost daily visits to Mr. Mansfield. They walked in the park, through gardens, along carriage paths, and across fields, occasionally catching a glimpse of the impressive edifice of the main house, but more often enjoying the views across the gently rolling park. Jane loved the way the sheep gathered under the isolated trees in the meadows at the hottest time of day. She relished the view of the stone bridge at the far end of the lake and the broader vistas that one particular hilltop provided beyond the boundaries of the estate and across the fields of Hampshire. They talked of nothing but books—what they had read, what they hoped to read, and, in Jane’s case, what she hoped to write. When they returned to the gatehouse after their walks, Jane would invariably read
aloud the latest chapter of her current project, a novel in letters called Elinor and Marianne. Mr. Mansfield would sit with his eyes closed listening to the gentle sound of her voice, then ponder the reading silently when she had finished. These were tense moments for Jane, for she valued his opinion, and knew that he would give it eventually. Often he approved of every word; other times he grimaced as he made suggestions.

  “You needn’t make such a face, Mr. Mansfield,” said Jane on one such occasion. “I take no offense at your criticism. Quite the contrary, I am honored that you grace me with your honest opinion. An opinion, I might add, which I believe strengthens my work.”

  “I only felt that if Sir John Middleton were a more affable sort—the type to throw parties or host picnics—your younger characters might be thrown together with more frequency.”

  “I confess I had not yet given much thought to the character of Sir John,” said Jane. “But I think you are right. And it should not take much rewriting to set him on a course to host picnics and balls aplenty.”

  “It is, I think,” said Mr. Mansfield, “the sign of a well-crafted novel when the minor characters are as fully realized as the hero and heroine.”

  “Wisely spoken, Mr. Mansfield. And I am certainly guilty of giving less life to those whose time upon the stage of my novel is but brief. It is a fault I shall endeavor to correct.”

  “Tell me, Miss Austen—you have said that you read these same pages at the rectory. Do you receive advice from your listeners there as well? Does your sister Cassandra offer you suggestions?”

  “Alas no, sir—though I often entreat her. I fear she believes her honest reaction would harm my feelings or somehow damage our intimacy, and so she says only that she thinks each chapter ‘marvelous,’ or, what is worse, ‘the best yet,’ without giving any indication how the inferior previous chapters might be brought up to the level of quality of the most recent. Your honesty, sir, is one of many reasons I so value our friendship.”