The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

So I am not completely ignorant on the topic of Jane Austen.”

Thelma had listened to the pretty, dark-haired artist’s angry tirade without changing her expression. Now her lined features softened and she surprised Eliza by reaching across the desk to gently touch her hand.

“I’m sorry, kid,” Thelma apologized. “I know I sometimes come off like the old battle ax that I am…” Her voice trailed away and she swiveled around in her chair and gazed out through the window at the busy street three stories below.

“If you only knew the number of creeps who come in here trying to get me to authenticate papers that prove George Washington was an alien…” she muttered.

Thelma suddenly turned back to face Eliza and her voice was once again strong and businesslike. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll admit I was talking down to you. Feel free to kick me if you catch me doing it again.”

Eliza grinned. “I promise,” she said.

“What I’m about to tell you won’t be found in the standard biographies,” Thelma began. “Of course, Darcy’s identity is one of the great unknowns of Austen’s work. But every schoolgirl who’s ever gotten hooked on P&P secretly suspects that the character must have been drawn from the author’s personal experience.” Thelma shrugged theatrically and held out upturned palms in a no-brainer gesture. “I mean, how else could Austen have so perfectly described that unforgettable and passionate relationship between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, right?”

Eliza found herself nodding. “Right!” she agreed.

“The problem is,” Thelma continued, her voice rising with the vehemence of a scholarly argument that Eliza suddenly realized the older woman must have been following since her graduate-school days, “that no man even vaguely fitting Darcy’s description exists as a historical figure in Jane Austen’s life. Not in her letters, not in the journals of her contemporaries, not in any of the several biographies written by her family members.”

Eliza frowned, trying to recall some of what she had read about the author’s life. “Jane did have a male admirer or two, didn’t she? Wasn’t there a young law student? I think his name was LeFroy or something like that.”

Thelma waved off the suggestion with a swatting gesture. “Oh, there was a brief and well-documented flirtation with a penniless student—a family friend, actually—when Jane was a girl. And, later, even a couple of marriages of convenience were proposed.” The older woman leaned forward, her eyes sparkling with excitement.

“But I’m talking Fitzwilliam Darcy here, a young, handsome and fantastically wealthy man with a vast estate. Now if such a person had been a force in Jane Austen’s life, don’t you think there’d be at least one reference to him somewhere in all her papers or in the volumes that have been written about her?” Thelma shook her head and leaned back in her chair. “But there’s nothing at all in the official Jane Austen record. Not a single word.”

Eliza frowned, for she was by now thoroughly confused. “Then I guess I really don’t understand,” she admitted.

“Aha!” Thelma Klein’s eyes took on a mischievous sparkle and she lowered her deep voice to a confidential level. “Note that I said there’s nothing in the official record. However, for some time now a few Austen scholars, myself included, have been developing an entirely new theory about Darcy, which may explain his absence from the official record.

“Did you know, for instance, that after Jane’s death her sister, Cassandra, and several other Austen family members methodically destroyed virtually all of the letters she had written, valuable letters that they had been preserving for decades?”

Eliza shook her head in wonderment.

“It’s a recorded fact,” Thelma said. “Jane was already becoming recognized as a major literary figure by the time of her death. People were beginning to know her and to know of her, so why do you suppose her family started destroying their most precious reminders of her?”

“To hide something?” Eliza speculated.

Thelma slapped the desk with the flat of her hand. “Bingo! Maybe to hide something potentially scandalous!” she declared. “Like a love affair with a man who was totally unacceptable, married perhaps or even potentially dangerous to the family in a political sense.”

Eliza felt her pulse quickening as she formed her next question, anxious now to delve even deeper into Thelma’s intriguing theory. “Is there any proof of that?” she inquired eagerly. “I mean, besides the fact that the family destroyed her letters.”

The researcher shook her head regretfully. “Oh, there have been some tantalizing hints over the years,” she conceded, “a scrap of strangely altered manuscript, stories about another letter from Jane to Darcy—”

Eliza sat up straight in her chair. “She wrote another letter to him?”

Thelma smiled knowingly. “I have an absolutely reliable source in London—a rare-book dealer—who swears that a letter to Darcy was discovered in the library collection of an English estate two years ago.” The smile faded and the researcher threw up her hands in frustration. “Unfortunately,” she grumbled, “the damned letter was snatched up by a private collector before anyone in my field even got a look at it. According to my friend, the letter was sold for a price in the high six figures.”

“That’s incredible!” Eliza said.

“If you think that’s incredible, consider this,” Thelma continued, “the collector was an American named Darcy.”

Eliza stared at her in disbelief. “Darcy at Pemberley Farms,” she murmured aloud, thinking suddenly of her annoying Internet pen pal.

Thelma shot up out of her chair like she’d been stuck with a hat pin. “Right!” she exclaimed. “Pemberley Farms! The bastard breeds horses somewhere in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley…” She frowned at Eliza. “How in the hell did you hear about him?”

“He…uh, sent me some e-mail,” Eliza replied guiltily. She felt her ears reddening as she remembered what Darcy had said in his e-mails. And she grimaced as she thought of the despicable way she had responded to him.

“Fantastic!” exclaimed Thelma, completely oblivious to Eliza’s pained expression as well as the evasive quality of the younger woman’s answer. “I’ve been trying to get to this guy for two years, but he refuses to respond to my calls and returns all of my letters unopened.”

Thelma’s expression was positively gleeful as she leaned forward expectantly. “Eliza, what did he say when he e-mailed you?”

Eliza smiled weakly. “He said he believes Jane Austen’s Darcy was a real person,” she replied.

Thelma’s excitement reached a crescendo as she leaped to her feet again and paced the tiny space behind her desk. “And I’m willing to bet that person will be found lurking somewhere in this Darcy’s family tree,” she declared emphatically. “Which explains why no English researcher ever discovered him.”

Thelma stopped pacing and leaned over the desk. “And it could also explain why her family wanted to cover up Jane’s involvement with him, and why they were perhaps forced to correspond in secret.”

Eliza gave her a blank look.

“History!” the researcher said impatiently. “Jane Austen’s lifetime coincides almost precisely with the one period in history when England and America were perpetually at one another’s throats, beginning with the American Revolution, which began the year after she was born, and continuing right up to the War of 1812, when the British burned Washington, among other unfriendly gestures.”

Thelma reached for Darcy’s letter and waved it in front of Eliza’s face. “Look at the date on this: 1810! Then read what it says: ‘The Captain has found me out.’”

“You know who the captain was?” Eliza asked in astonishment.

“Well, two of Jane’s brothers were high-ranking British naval officers whose duty in 1810 was trying to stop American ships from running guns and munitions to the French,” Thelma replied. “I imagine that either of them would have been naturally suspicious of any American, much less one they suspected of dallying with their sister. And if news spread that Jane was carrying on a relationship with a man who would have been considered a potential enemy of Britain,” she theorized, “their careers would surely have been ruined.”

Thelma was positively dancing in place by this time. “Oh, this is positively delicious,” she laughed, holding