For a start, I’m a man, and old enough to be Jane Austen’s father, if she were alive today. But her father was her great supporter, and I also have a daughter, who is a successful playwright and TV scriptwriter.
Worse, I’m a statistician by training and a marketing consultant by practice. But my job involved a lot of writing: copywriting to convince sceptical consumers, and report writing to convince demanding managements. And All my life, I’ve been surrounded by graduates of English Literature: my mother, my wife and my daughter.
I did consider writing as Jemima Cook, but decided that two avatars was one too many. Besides,there is a certain humour in the idea of a man writing as Jane Austen – cross-writing as opposed to cross-dressing – which Jane Austen herself might have appreciated.
Jane Austen has been my prose model ever since my wife introduced me to her novels shortly after we first met. Ever since, I’ve admired the cadence of her prose, the balance of her sentences, and the realism of her dialogue, despite it being highly stylised. Like verismo opera. For years, I drew from her writing no more than the principles of good prose, which work just as much for copywriting and report-writing as fiction.
My eureka moment came on reading Margaret Drabble’s intro to Penguin’s edition of Lady Susan, The Watsons & Sanditon: “There are some great writers who wrote too much… others who wrote enough… yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these. There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete, new novel by Jane Austen than [almost] any other literary discovery.”
Jane Austen is dead, I told myself, but she had the time during her silent period, between abandoning The Watsons in 1804 and starting Mansfield Park in 1811, for at least three further novels at her normal pace – so why not write them for her? I even toyed with the idea of pretending that I really had discovered fresh manuscripts, but decided that cheating was wrong, and something that Jane herself would never countenance.
Yet it took time to nerve myself to try. Could I, and even if I could, should I? But the thought kept nagging. There could be no better tribute to the author I revere above all others. So, I drafted a few half Chapters, and didn't much like them. They were OK, but no more than that, pale echoes of what I really wanted. I left them for a while, until I finally got down to some serious writing and research. Jane Austen is fairly light on detail of what her characters or the places they inhabit actually look like. But to make my versions of her hints and asides plausible, I had to do far more digging than I expected. Nor is much of what I found in the text: like her, I learnt the art of allusion.
I hope readers will enjoy Speculation as much as I have enjoyed writing it. And that Jane Austen would approve...
