you don’t read other folk’s letters. postcards maybe.

"the sidmouth letters" (jane gardam, 1980)

Phil Richards via Wikimedia Commons

The piece of writing I’ve talked about the most this year in “real life” isn’t a bit of non-fiction or a newsletter or whatever. It wasn’t even published this year. It’s a short story by Jane Gardam called “The Sidmouth Letters.”¹ I actually liked this short story so much that—this is true—I briefly considered launching a “book club” on here basically to manipulate other people into reading it. I didn’t really have any other ideas about what a book club would do, which is one reason I did not do this. I liked it so much that I went to a wedding where I think I found myself pitching it to three separate people, like I’d move onto the next conversation, there’d be a lull, and then I’d be like

…sooooOOOOOOOooooOOOOooooo…

The reason a “book club” is superior to what I am about to do, however, is because a big part of what makes “The Sidmouth Letters” so good is how it’s constructed, and there is no way to talk about it that doesn’t end up flattening it out. So you know. What you should really do is close this window and go buy her collected stories and read it and then go out and start clubbing your friends with it until they read it and so on. That’s what you should do. You should go to jail for assault in the name of literature.

But you won’t—and I can’t because I bought the Kindle version and it makes a bad club and anyway there’s nobody around—so instead I’m going to tell you about it.

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“The Sidmouth Letters” divides, on first read, neatly into two parts. In the first part the narrator, Annie, reflects on her odd inescapable acquaintance with an old professor of hers, “Shorty” Shenfold, a flashy American who lives vampirically off of rich, exhausted wives. Annie studied with Shorty for a year at an American college, where she wrote a paper for him about Jane Austen and a romance she suspected Austen had once had in the seaside town of Sidmouth. Shorty plagiarized this piece and has gone on to become something of a public intellectual.

Annie records this theft with a tone of indifference though a later reflection—“what had happened to all the dear old friends, the ones who in novels are suddenly there in the street beside you, dancing to the music of time? Why for me was there only unspeakable Shenfold?”—makes clear she is not particularly friendly to him.

But then Shorty’s most recent wife dies unexpectedly; he, having to deal with her funeral arrangements, enlists Annie to go to that same seaside town in search of love letters of Austen’s that were purportedly kept by a family there.

At this point, the story pivots:

‘I shan’t need paying, Shorty.’

He looked at me with utter hatred because I did not need paying and because I was going to see the letters—and again the troubled look. A ripple of pure annoyance went across the big bumpy forehead, not a thought, nor even quite a feeling; a sort of intuitive shadow that there was something he had missed, something he should have spotted all those years ago when he had looked in to my background before giving me the scholarship to his college in America; when I had written my piece on Love and Privacy.

Which there was. He had forgotten that on my application form it had said where I was born and had lived with my family for twenty years. In ‘Austen heartland’. At Sidmouth.

That is, the family whose have kept these letters for long—is her family. When she arrives on Shorty’s behalf, her cousin Enid is shocked to discover Annie has been sent here in perfect ignorance of their relationship—“‘You mean,’ said Enid, looking down her nose as she had done when telling me that the Austens were nothing socially out of the way, ‘you mean that he doesn’t know that we are cousins!’”

Annie is aware that she is regarded by her family as a failure—not only in terms of living up to her potential, which perhaps no one ever really does, but also living up to who she was when she was ten years old, when she would fill up notebooks with her writing with ease. Standing before Enid, she knows that to her cousin she is just a woman with “no proper job, no marriage, only four or five novels in goodness knows how many years. Bits of reviewing. Something insignificant and part-time for the British Council. And after such a good start. Cambridge, then America.”

Her great-aunt, who is the person who really owns the letters, laments that Annie is not writing “really well-known books by now, full of descriptions.”² Nevertheless, she gives Annie the letters, though as her inheritance, not to give to Shorty. Annie leaves and burns Austen’s letters without reading them.

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One thing that “The Sidmouth Letters” is not about, I think, is whether or not Annie is right to burn the letters. She experiences no uncertainty on this matter herself and you, too, feel she has done the right thing, even if you have no particular prejudice against reading dead people’s letters (or even relish doing so, as in my case). Much like Shakespeare Austen is one of the English language’s most significant writers and much like Shakespeare we know very little about her.³ What we do know is that stuff that really matters—the novels.

Annie feels this all acutely because at home she is subjected to loving but intrusive surveillance. People know her—the everyday her, the her who has failed at adulthood in various significant ways, the her about whom people ask—what went wrong, whatever happened to her. Which makes it impossible to be the other Annie, the private Annie, the one who writes.

No, what obsessed me about this story was the pivot and the realization that in Annie we have a narrator determined to give away as little as possible and only at the last moment. To whatever extent such a thing is possible Annie tries to be the neutral pane of glass through which the light falls. The fullest image we get of her is that glimpse of what she imagines she must seem to her cousin. She is a narrator determined to preserve her own privacy and thus we never discover what one would consider important facts about her—what her novels are like, what her life is like. She remains stubborn and elusive. Thus Austen’s deliberately blanked-out life is recapitulated in Annie’s own deceptive transparency.

The other thing about “The Sidmouth Letters,” though it only really emerged in a re-read, is that it also divides easily into three parts. These are not narrative parts so much as relational ones—there is Annie and Shorty, Annie and her family, and then there is Annie and Shorty’s dead wife, Lois. Annie met Lois twice; both times Lois was drunk. The second time they meet, they are at Austen’s old home. Lois stands looking out a window:

‘She never met anyone like me, did she? Don’t seem to me she knew a lot. I bet she’d never even looked inside that pub.’

She began to cry.

‘Someone ought a write a book about me,’ she said, ‘not about this bitch. About me. Dare say they will. Some hard-mouthed boring bitch. Some frienda Shorty. Shorty likes a hard-mouthed bitch. Write her up. Lot this bitch knew—’

That night she dies.

It is an odd sense of loyalty to Lois, a person she never really knew, that leads Annie to agree to undertake Shorty’s mission in the first place. Her loyalty is not even to Lois herself perhaps so much as Lois’s evident misery, her “untidy” and unhappy life, which is completely erased mere hours after she’d died. Lois’s sad complaint that Austen didn’t have any space in her universe for somebody “like me” echoes as the story goes on. Lois does not have the trick of seeming transparent without really being so; she’s simply on display with her guts out. Used for her money, she has died as if she has never been.

So what to do with Lois? Nobody even seems to mourn her—Annie’s memory of her unhappiness doesn’t really count as such. Why does she have such a prominent place at the beginning of this story? One answer, I think, is what I just said—that she provides a kind of alternative vision of a life without privacy but also without love. She and Annie have both been “used” by Shorty but Annie was able to get away unscathed. Shorty’s parasitism on women is mirrored by the way he gains fame through a combination of impeccable, “bludgeon”-ing scholarship and shit-stirring public articles that like to insinuate knowledge of “nasty” secrets about their subjects.⁴ Shorty is a good scholar who knows how to get attention, but he gets that attention at the expense of his objects of study, not to their benefit.

The other thing, though, that I noticed on re-reading is that Shorty is really the story’s only man. There are apparently no living men in Annie’s family; her cousin is unmarried; it is Austen and not her lover that the mysterious letters promise knowledge of. So my other thought was that part of the surprise of this story was this hidden web of womanly connection and loyalty, which makes Annie feel tied to Lois as well as loyal to Austen—a web which interests Shorty so little that he doesn’t even know to worry about it.

1. You can probably (?) log in to read it here. (By the way I put in 1980 as the date in the subhead but that’s the date it was collected. I’m not sure about when it was written.)

2. Later: “It’s a tragedy about Annie. I don’t know who it was or what went wrong. All she does is write these very good books. Books that get wonderful mentions.”

3. Enid suggests that Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra, who burned Austen’s personal papers, might not have if she’d known how important her sister would be later. But if anything, Austen’s later fame would probably have been to her sister an even bigger reason to do so.

4. Even in his plagiarized version of Annie’s article, he manages to make it sound as if Jane Austen’s unknown lover fled from her.