Read The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen for Free Online Page A

by tomorrow morning, about nine o’clock, and we’ll have a look.”
    “
We?
” My pulse quickened. “Fantastic! Thank you! So you’ll help me?”
    “Why not? I told you, I like mysteries. And God knows, it’ll be more fun than weeding.”
    We both laughed.
    Over dessert and coffee, we talked of other things. Anthony told me he’d graduated from Oxford a few years before I was there. He had been divorced for twelve years, and was still single. He’d married right out of college, but he and his wife had been too young, and had wanted different things. His mother had passed away about five years before. They’d been close. He’d been estranged from his father for decades, which I thought was sad. My own dad died when I was in high school, and I admitted that I missed both of my parents every day.
    I told him about Stephen. “My mother used to look at me with a little smile and say, ‘You should marry that doctor.’”
    “Are you going to?” he asked, and seemed very interested in my reply.
    I suddenly felt a little awkward. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve thought about it.”
    When I asked what he did for a living, Anthony told me he was a vice president at a venture capital firm.
    “I coordinate the financing to help start-up companies get up and running, and help established corporations get the money they need to expand,” he explained.
    “Do you enjoy it?”
    “Very much. I like to say that I get people the money they need to follow their dreams. How about you? I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you…love books?”
    I laughed. “I’ve been in love with books ever since I was a little girl and read
Charlotte’s Web
and
The Secret Garden
. Later, I graduated to Austen, Dickens, and the Brontës, with Austen my hands-down favorite. I wanted to live inside an Austen novel!When I was a freshman in college, I took an intro to literature class and realized that you could read good books, write about them, and talk about them, and actually get a degree in that. I was sold! My goal at the time was to be a college English teacher. And I did teach for two years at the community-college level, but it was a nightmare.”
    “Why?”
    “I could never get enough classes at one location to make it a full-time job. I had to commute between three different schools, and one of them was sixty miles away. There’s a glut of MA’s on the market, and so many teachers are stuck in that position, there’s a name for them: Freeway Flyers. It’s mind-numbingly exhausting, and the pay is atrocious. When I took into account how much time I was spending in the car, prepping for classes, teaching, and reading students’ papers, I was earning less than minimum wage.”
    “Good God.”
    “I did enjoy the
teaching
part, though—very much. I loved working with students and sharing my love of literature. So I decided I wanted to teach at the university level, which meant going back to school and getting my doctorate.”
    “Which you pursued at Oxford.”
    “Yes. Studying here in England—land of Austen—was like a dream come true for me. But then my mom got sick. I had to drop everything, go home, and take care of her. I needed a job, fast, to help pay my mom’s medical bills. I had worked in the Special Collections department of my university library for years as an undergrad, and I spent a lot of time in the Bodleian Library while I was at Oxford. When I came back, there was an opening for a Library Assistant at Chamberlain University, and they took me in. When the Special CollectionsLibrarian retired, I started filling in for her. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but then the budget got cut. They couldn’t afford two positions, and they couldn’t hire anyone new, so they offered me the job permanently.”
    “Was that a difficult switch to make—from teacher to librarian?”
    “It was—at first. But I really enjoy it now.”
    “Have you thought about going back to Oxford?”
    “No. That