Invisible Sister (eBook)

Mary E. Wells (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
256 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-9752-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Journalist Alexa Stephens is fascinated by the life of 19th century author and scholar Margaret Fuller. She finally convinces the publisher of the magazine she works for in Madison, Wisconsin to pay her expenses to research Fuller at an obscure museum in a small town in Massachusetts. While digging through old boxes she discovers what might be a long-lost and totally unheard-of manuscript by Jane Austen. Wells writes Austen-like prose and takes the reader back to the Bennet family after the time of "e;Pride and Prejudice."e; Controversy follows the discovery.

Textauszug

Chapter One

Obsession

“Romeo, Ahab, and that crazy woman from the Stephen King novel Misery – those people were obsessed. Just because I want to write about Margaret Fuller doesn’t put me in the same league with those doomed souls. I’m not about to break your ankles because you keep turning down my ideas.” Alexa smiled sweetly at her boss, Justin Cabot, but there was enough roguish insouciance in her eyes to imply that perhaps the idea had occurred to her. Cabot, familiar with Alexa’s determined negotiating tactics, was uncomfortable with the ankle breaking bit but remained undeterred in rejecting yet another pitch for an article about Fuller.

“But your examples are all fictional characters, Alexa, written to be over the top fanatical. I have before me a flesh and blood, award-winning writer who is acting like one of those hopeless characters, as if her life depends on an article about an obscure Transcendentalist author. Get over your mania for that woman. Drop this quixotic quest and write something our readership might actually enjoy.”

“Justin, give me five minutes to make my case and if I can’t convince you there’s a relevant story here, I’ll spend a month covering the legislature when it convenes. You can tell how serious I am because you know how much I detest those coma-inducing budget hearings.”

“You’re pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?” Cabot dreaded the sparring that would ensue until Alexa made all her points but he felt he could not betray any interest in whatever she planned to propose until she ended her argument. In truth, he was still intimidated by his star writer despite having developed an amicable working relationship with her. Studied indifference was his only bargaining chip. In confrontations like this, it was the tactic he employed to remind her he was the boss and she the employee. He had no talent for acting so wasn’t entirely convinced he fooled Alexa, nevertheless he held no enthusiasm for another pitch about Fuller and his faced showed it.

“What angle have you contrived this time to justify an article about that woman?” Giving Alexa no time to answer, Cabot put his head in his hands as though receiving the answer telepathically. After a moment he raised his eyes to hers and answered his own question. “No, wait. Let me guess. Feminism in the 1840s. That’s surely a page-turner. Or maybe Margaret Fuller’s Top 10 Reading List. Really, Alexa, can there be anything about this woman relevant to our readership? It’s 2019 not 1849 and lest you forget, at 608 Magazine we publish contemporary non-fiction with a smattering of history—local Madison and Wisconsin history, not nineteenth century east coast Transcendental lit history.”

 

Cabot, publisher of 608 Magazine, scrutinized his best writer, Alexa Stephens, knowing she was undeterred by his sarcasm and that he was in for a lengthy argument in favor of an article about Fuller, a writer that Alexa seemed determined to foist on the magazine’s readership. He could not envision the modest but fervent readership of 608 eagerly awaiting such a subject so had turned down Alexa’s previous proposals about her. If Alexa continued to deny his accusation of being obsessed, Cabot was ready to list the other times she had pitched articles about Fuller, a woman Alexa called “the ugly duckling that never quite became the swan.”

It was a description Alexa feared was beginning to define her own existence. She had often joked that in her forty plus years she’d been “everything average” and that was fine. Of middling height, plain brown hair now tending to streaks of silver, and as of yet with no inked body art, her looks had always been typical, not exceptional. She was aware she wasn’t a knockout. Yet from grade school on she knew she was intelligent, as Fuller must have known about herself. The parallels were hard to ignore. Like Fuller, Alexa had begun writing at an early age and never stopped, she had experienced disappointment in her personal life as had Fuller, and though well respected locally, Alexa had yet to achieve the recognition she felt her writing had the potential to earn.

Alexa’s friends had given up arguing against the ‘average’ assessment she insisted on but everyone complimented her intelligence and wit, attributes she admitted she might put her above average, as if she’d been a product of that fictional lake community made famous on the radio. Not anywhere near genius, Alexa studied hard and applied herself to whatever subject required her attention, the study itself as stimulating as the results it produced. Fuller, she knew, was just such a determined scholar.

“Fuller biographers describe her as having insatiable ambition.” Alexa hoped to catch Justin’s imagination with that opening. His expression remained opaque. “She was driven by a difficult childhood—more like no childhood at all—with a father who demanded nothing less than Margaret excelling in rigorous studies and a mother whose only expectation for her brilliant daughter was for her to marry.”

“Nothing unusual there but carry on. Astonish me.” Cabot’s comment told Alexa astonishing him wasn’t going to be easy.

“With a congenital curvature of the spine, severe nearsightedness and a social awkwardness that kept her estranged from young people her age, I can’t believe Margaret was anyone’s conception of the ideal marriage prospect. Still, I’m fascinated by the woman’s tenacity in overcoming those obstacles and saw potential in writing about that.”

While Cabot listened he tapped a pencil in irritation, having to endure hearing another argument when he would rather be spending a Monday morning quietly thinking about the trout fishing fly he planned to tie later that evening. As the attention of her boss floated downstream with the fly, Alexa weighed her publisher’s indictment of her interest in Fuller. Yes, she had pitched numerous articles about the Transcendentalist author. Yes, she admitted a fascination with the “best read woman in America,” as Fuller was once known. And yes, she’d read half a dozen books about her, wanting to understand the forces that had shaped the writer. Yet it wasn’t the woman herself who prompted her interest.

Alexa wasn’t sure she would have liked Fuller who, from an early age, came off as a snob about her educational attainments. No, the woman was not the source of Alexa’s fascination. She had begun to suspect Fuller’s nearly life-long quest for fame, financial security and an “aching wish” for a man in her life had seeped off the pages of those biographies and into Alexa’s subconscious. Fuller’s passion to be recognized as a writer with skill and talent had become Alexa’s own and lately she had come to feel that kind of fame was as elusive for her as it had been to Fuller.

Empathy for Fuller was evolving into greater recognition of the parallels in her own life and a subtle distress at the similarities. Alexa was good at her job but considered her career stuck in neutral, satisfying her need to write but not affording the outlet for the kind of writing she imagined herself capable of. Her income was more than comfortable for life in Wisconsin’s capital. Frugality and freelancing had produced a financial cushion that would provide flexibility should she want to leave 608, yet she knew trading one magazine for another was only a side step not a move forward. And the prospect of encountering a person with whom to share her life, Fuller’s “aching wish,” seemed increasingly unlikely. It was as if Fuller expressed the longings of all ambitious women, regardless of century, who sought to make a living with words. Alexa felt Fuller’s frustrations and hoped writing an article about her might make her come to terms with her own. Maybe Justin was right, she was obsessed because here she was, pleading with him one more time to approve an article.

Driving to work that Monday morning of the last week of August, Alexa had scanned the faces of the commuters around her and laughed at the serious and sullen looks, apt expressions for the prospect of another dreary work week ahead, a feeling Alexa found impossible to share. Writing was tonic for her and even though her subjects were not always to her taste, the process of researching and writing was consistently beneficial. Spending her days at the 608 offices was like a day in the sunshine to her. How could you scowl about that?

She liked working at the well-respected 608 and, unknown to her boss and friends, wrote for a slightly less reputable outlet, an online site called TheWritersPit where 80sMADGRRL, her pseudonymous persona, delighted in writing satire pieces on politics. Those articles had a decidedly left lean though she also took shots at “living room liberals” who expressed outrage at the current state of politics but couldn’t be convinced voting might be a better expression of that rage than posts on social media. As a consequence of her equal opportunity jibes she got nasty feedback from both ends of the political spectrum, which she thought was a good way of getting the sense of her community.

Looking again at the drivers passing her, Alexa had weighed all the bits of her existence, acknowledging how fortunate she was in the essential aspects of her life. Still, professionally, she wanted more. After an early but short marriage and more than a decade at the magazine, Alexa Stephens knew she had a life many envied and she was not unmindful of the opportune turns in her life. She had been known to scoff at successful contemporaries who complained of “something missing” but of late she was...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.10.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-9752-5 / 1098397525
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-9752-4 / 9781098397524