While the virus rages

In the world as I expected it to be, I am packing my chic new suitcase for two weeks in England. My book group leaves tomorrow – tomorrow! –for a week-long, small-group tour of Jane Austen country. A week later, my husband will be meeting me in London. Friends from Yorkshire will visit museums with us and sit next to us at Stoppard’s new play, Leopoldstadt. After they leave, we’ll go to the indoor theater at the Globe for a candlelit production of Taming of the Shrew. I’ll finally see the Tower of London. (When I lived in England as a young woman, I disdained the crowded and noisy tourist sites. Now I make reservations and see them. Hampton Court is on the list, too.)

In this parallel universe – which is just as vivid and vastly more exciting than the Coronavirus universe I’m actually inhabiting – I am hovering over my suitcase, chewing over exactly how many pairs of pants I can take and still get the latch to close. I’m weighing my hiking shoes on the bathroom scale and siphoning my hair products into little squeeze tubes. I’m very, very up for this trip.

As you know, I am not leaving on a plane tomorrow. Instead, I will be – as a friend reminded me – living a Jane Austen sort of life.

In a letter to her nephew written shortly before her death, Austen described herself as writing on “a little bit (not two Inches wide) of Ivory.” No one travels very far in a Jane Austen novel. The adventures are interior and emotional. Her characters host their neighbors for dinner (prepared by the servants). They trim hats and write letters and take long walks. They attend the occasional ball. They refer to a trip of forty miles as an arduous journey. (We might do the same if we had to bounce over those Regency-era roads in horse-drawn carriages.)

These days, most of us over 65 are living lives almost as circumscribed as those of Austen’s characters. We take walks, have conversations (some of them via text), read books (some of them on our Kindles), and write letters (on our computers or phone screens). Because we don’t have servants, we do our laundry and grocery shop, wearing nitrile gloves. Not having servants has two benefits: we get out of the house, and we don’t have to live with servants intruding on our lives.

Our lives are both better and worse than those of Lizzie Bennet and Anne Elliot. We have Netflix but no dinner parties. We take long daily walks, but when we encounter neighbors, we wave and pet their dogs and converse from six feet away. We see our friends, kids, and grandkids frequently but only via FaceTime. (It’s better than nothing. It’s also nothing like snuggling up with them on the couch.)

Jane Austen observed the lives around her with a tart but gentle irony I can only aspire to. “Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure,” she wrote. Also, “Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.” And “Nobody minds having what is too good for them.” (Now that is a truth universally acknowledged.) When it’s hard to concentrate on a novel because my mind agitates obsessively over the latest news, I remind myself, “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” (There are moments these days when I am, without a doubt, intolerably stupid.)

As my friend also reminded me, I am lucky to be at home with my own Mr. Darcy. Even more luckily, my husband combines Mr. Darcy’s good judgment and intelligence with the sunny, open temperament of Mr. Bingley. Although I’ve never seen my own Mr. Darcy surface from a pond with his shirt plastered to his chest (neither, of course, did the Lizzie Bennet of the novel), I have seen him mowing the lawn while wearing a sweaty tee-shirt and a goofy grin – which is just as sexy and also makes me smile.

How would Ms. Austen’s characters fare in the Age of Coronavirus?

Here’s Mrs. Bennet as a slightly exaggerated version of me yesterday:

“Oh, Mr. Bennet,” said that man’s wife, coming into his study all aflutter. “How shall I endure it?”
“Endure what, my dear?” asked that gentleman, not lifting his eyes from the screen of his computer.
“The housecleaner arrives in twenty minutes!”
“So he has done every other Thursday for years,” Mr. Bennet pointed out with admirable equanimity, still typing away on his keyboard.
“But with this dreadful virus, I cannot go out to lunch! Even my favorite coffee shop has shut its doors! What shall I do in this dreadful rain? I cannot walk. Where shall I be while he is here?”
At last Mr. Bennet swiveled his chair and met her eyes with an indulgent smile. “You must content yourself, my dear, with following the cleaner about from room to room and pointing out to him all the corners he has not swept properly for the past several years.”
Much struck by this prospect, Mrs. Bennet lapsed into a brief silence. Soon, however, she rallied and began to laugh. “Oh, Mr. Bennet,” she said fondly, “how you do tease. I shall simply hole up in my study as you do and write!”
“Exactly, my dear,” murmured Mr. Bennet as turned back to his desk. “I’ll see you at luncheon.”

Here’s another — and equally unflattering — picture of myself yesterday:

Emma Woodhouse, clever, handsome, and rich, examined her closet with a discontented eye. How could it have happened that she had purchased all those new spring clothes when she had nowhere to wear them? Perhaps today she might try the denim leggings from J Jill with the new tunic in that lovely blue fabric? Her father had failed to notice that she sat down to dinner the night before in the same athletic clothes she’d worn for the past few days, but the more perceptive Mr. Knightly had judgmentally — though she must admit, fairly — arched his eyebrows at her. It struck her forcefully that the blue of the tunic would appear charmingly on a video screen, as they spoke on Zoom that evening with their friends from Boston.

I will leave to someone else to rewrite the hilarious paragraph of Emma in which the new Mrs. Elton picks strawberries at Mr. Knightly’s Donwell Abbey. (She begins in ecstasy and ends, half an hour later, with her head aching from the glare of the sun and her back aching from bending over. It’s narrated in Mrs. Elton’s own voice, and it’s very funny.)

So, my friends, what are your favorite passages from the novels – or scenes from the movies and mini-series? Have you seen the new version of Emma yet? And how are faring in this strange Jane-Austen-like world?