Work Text:
Covering letter [Transcribed at the request of the sender. Address omitted, ditto]
Dear Susan
I find myself on the horns of an almost inconceivable dilemma and must ask for your advice again. As you know, when I first got an inkling of the nature of the “find” I asked you to represent the College in relation to the copyright issues, in the event that it did turn out to be what we scarcely dared to hope it might. Now we have analysed the two MSS in depth, and, although the scientific tests are still continuing, I may say the hypothesis that we have before us a genuine work is looking more and more solid at least on the provable facts of the dates of the paper, composition of the ink and so forth. If so, I know that I am now contemplating simultaneously breaking upon the world a literary sensation and causing a literary scandal the like of either of which will set the standards of such things for the century to come. One look at the two transcripts enclosed will show you what I mean.
For obvious reasons, I do not wish either I, or the College, to be identified at this stage, and must therefore ask you to retype this letter and to conceal all evidence of its provenance. Similarly, so far as the public facts behind the great discovery are concerned, the best that I can offer is that the MSS in question appeared from a blocked up cupboard during renovations at a house in Oxford; that the MSS were caught up in a bundle of newspapers dating from late 1917 and early 1918, and that it was impossible from the context to identify whether the circumstances indicated that they had been deliberately hidden within the bundle, or accidentally caught up in it during some spring cleaning exercise, perhaps by an over-zealous charwoman.
In the circumstances, although I ask you to act with considerable discretion, I have the support of the SCR in asking you to make a limited disclosure to a select few, so as best to use the wide ranging contacts you possess in the relevant fields, who are peculiarly able to cast light on the contents of the manuscript and answer the questions :
Who indeed wrote it? And, for that matter, who may have read it and thereafter concealed it?
I look forward to receiving your findings in early course.
Yours, etc.
Transcript the First
My Dear Henry
You ask how the new work comes on, and the answer is – not at all. I enclose the fragment that is the product of so many days effort (and so many hours incivility to C and my Mother – who bear it well, save when the gooseberries are to be preserved, and I not at my place to sieve, and sieve, and sieve again). The beginning is well enough, with Miss Rachel set to take Society by storm, only asking for a young man to offer to serve his seven years (tho’ I think if he were very insistent she might remit his sentence a trifle). But which is she to choose between: his musical Lordship, and the elegant Frederick, and the young portrait painter who moons about and sighs for her in the shrubbery? How, though, to go on? Each time I drive my people forrad, they turn on me like the pigs last sennight, that broke from Jones’ man and would not be drove to market, so that we were five hours chasing them out of the orchard and our Mother in such a taking for fear of her flower beds. Before I am two sentences on they will have such ideas – Horrid Romances, and Resurrection Men, and Miss Rachel’s father coming to such an end – that only a Radcliffe or a D’Arblay could do them justice – they are no kin of mine. Do, Henry dear, look after these few pages for me. I propose to pull down Miss Fanny from the rack, and if she does not calm my fevered brain then there is no hope for me. Give my best love to Eliza and tell her I am too cross to write as she deserves.
Yr loving sister
Jane
Transcript the Second
A trifle above thirty-five years ago, a Miss Ford of Hampshire, being determined to marry to disoblige her family (who were a race of Wessex squires, more disposed to count the number of quarterings on their escutcheon than the length of their rentroll), did so with more than accustomed thoroughness by fixing upon a Mr Reuben Levy, a Hebrew by religion, and a merchant by calling. Nor did the gentleman have great wealth to distinguish him, being possessed of little more than a competency. In the circumstances, therefore, her friends and family threw her off with great alacrity, feeling justified not only in predicting the conventional tribulations of poverty and discredit in this world, but in adding even less sanguine predictions for Mrs Levy’s fate in the next.
Being at once bereft of family, fortune and friends Mrs Levy retained nonetheless two sterling blessings. The first was the unswerving devotion of her husband, and their deepening mutual attachment, and the second was the steadfast friendship of a Miss Delagardie, a woman some years older than she, a close neighbour of her family, and the only one of her intimate friends who continued to correspond following her marriage.
Indeed, Miss Delagardie went further, in attempting to reconcile Mrs Levy’s family to the match, by pointing out Mr Levy’s sobriety, industry, and devotion, compared to the common lot of young men, and finally, when reason failed to prevail, by observing in heated tones that those who set out to demonstrate the superiority of the Christian faith, might do well to live by Christian precepts.
It is an unhappy truth that the opinions of a gentlewoman, when unmarried and of small fortune, carry but little weight, however liberal the sentiments or witty the mode of their expression. Accordingly, Mrs Ford did nothing more than to deliver herself of the bitter Philippic that “Her daughter, who might trace her line from the Saxon kings, had married one whose line went back only to Isaac’s sons”; and Mrs Levy’s father openly regretted that he had opposed his daughter’s match to a young neighbour on the sole grounds that he had deliberately chosen the profession of barber-chirugeon, confessing that he would now have compounded for that match, as the lesser of two evils. In the face of such expressions as these Miss Delagardie prudently took her leave.
However, Miss Delagardie’s wisdom and influence were soon thereafter much increased by her receiving an unexpected proposal of marriage from a young man of elevated rank and considerable fortune. Furthermore, her husband’s father having the discretion to die of good living and complacency during the first few months of her married life, she shortly found herself moving within the first circles of the kingdom. Although her circle of intimates was as much increased by her marriage as Mrs Levy’s had been diminished, the Duchess did not forget her former friend. Her views could have had one tenth the charity, and one fiftieth the sense of their former character, and they would still have been regarded by her circle as prescriptive; and so much did she work upon Mr and Mrs Ford that in little more than a year following the wedding they could be prevailed upon to admit that they hoped their daughter might be happy.
Happy she was, and her husband’s genius in his calling at last began to shower her with as much of the world’s goods as she might desire. One sorrow did remain, and that was that their union was not blessed with offspring until many years after its commencement, and that even then she could not bring her husband the hoped-for son to carry on his family name and fortune. The only child to survive to maturity, a girl, named Rachel for his mother, was, however, the darling child of both her parents.
Despite the best of educations, she was sensible, modest and well-read, with very pretty, even features, and had not long left the schoolroom when her parents began to plan a ball to launch her into Society.
“Mr Levy,” her mother began one day at breakfast, “the Dowager is in Town again. She will be the perfect chaperone.”
“My dear,” Sir Reuben said, “I do not trust you so little as to require your chaperoning. Be assured, that whatever you do, and wherever you go, is quite proper in my eyes. It may be a little modern, but let it be so.”
“Fiddlesticks! You know I am speaking of the other girls at Rachel’s ball. It would be a discredit to them and to us if everything were not quite proper. Consider what young men are like these days!”
“Much the same as we were, I daresay; only with greater opportunities and distressingly more limited imagination as to what to do with them. Are the Dowager’s sons in Town also?”
“Only the younger one – the musical one”.
“Ah – the one without a wife. I trust the two are not connected. And do we invite him with his mother?”
“ I scarcely feel we cannot, if Honoria comes.”
Lady Levy looked all that was properly bored at this admission, but husbands and wives generally know pretty well where a mask of indifferent social obligation conceals an implacable command, and Sir Reuben acquiesced with a good grace in sending round his cards. The Dowager’s response was all that was friendly and good-natured – she should apologise frankly for her negligence in correspondence over recent years – her late husband had not been fit since well before his death for entertaining (“At least, entertaining cits,” Sir Reuben said sardonically) – she would be charmed to be of use –would lend some Famille Rose jars if she were permitted – and might she bring her son’s friend Frederick - Lord –‘s youngster – just starting out on ‘Change and eager to hear Sir Reuben’s views on market movements ?
The ball was fixed, and everyone prepared to be happy.
[here the fragment ends]