Page 14 of Inventing Mr Darcy

As Fisher warned me, it’s … a lot. Years of files, the vast majority of them things I have forgotten and will never need again, but a few of them absolutely essential, all in a scramble, every one of them with the same Last Modified date. And as for the “wonky” file names? You know how sometimes your computer crashes unexpectedly while you’re working and when you restart it, it asks you if you want to save the temporary file it created, which it’s helpfully named temp%20%$? Yeah, that. Over and over again.

The first thing I open is a lab report from the required biology class I took as a junior, and the sigh I heave is loud enough to echo in the otherwise silent room. Cleaning up this mess is going to suuuuuck, and I suck at making myself do boring things I don’t want to do (see also, finishing my grad degree in four years like I was supposed to).

Speaking of unpleasant messes, I suddenly remember the sign in the basement of Kirwin. Closing the folder, I log into the GC library website and scroll down to the alphabetical list of databases to reassure myself about AUSTEN-C.

It’s not there.

Ordinarily, when you can’t find something that used to be available on the library webpage, budget cuts are the most obvious explanation. But because GC houses this database, it doesn’t have to pay to subscribe.

A terrible thought pops into my mind. I keep scrolling, past familiar titles—Digital Humanities Online, History Net, the Modern Languages and Literatures Bibliography—until I come to O. And there’s that name again.

Obscure Writers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (OWEN-C)

My hand trembles as I click on the link. I don’t know whether I’m angry or confused or scared. Maybe all three. Because what opens is the database I’ve come to know intimately over the last several years. And something else entirely at the same time.

For one thing, the texts it houses are no longer written exclusively by women.

I poke around a bit, looking for the file I tried unsuccessfully to upload during the storm. And there it is, sections of gibberish interspersed with words I know well … well, sort of. It both is and isn’t Jane Austen.

Like the database itself, it’s at once familiar and strange.

Determined to get rid of the evidence of my mistake as quickly as possible, I log into the database with my administrator access (which works in spite of the fact it’s not the same database, and I’m trying really hard not to ask myself why) and delete the file of mangled scraps. Then I open another tab in the browser and, as I had on Friday, type “Jane Austen” into the search bar, intending to start the whole process again.

No results found.

Weird. I recall my difficulty finding Plainly Jane on BeeSocial. I hit refresh on my search and watch the little circle spin.

No results found.

I even try my students’ preferred misspelling of “Jane Austin,” though it pains me to type it.

A few hits this time, but not what I’m looking for. A hairstylist in Shreveport. A lawyer in Spokane.

It’s as if one of the world’s most famous authors has simply disappeared. But how can that be? Sweat prickles in my armpits and my stomach churns. I try another search, but this one is just as unsuccessful as the rest.

“Pride and Prejudice.”

No results found.

SIX

In the morning, I’m awakened by Cassie poking her head into my bedroom. “Hey, Elle, I’m heading ou—wowww … What happened in here?”

I jerk up my head and look around. I’m sitting on the floor with my arms draped over the edge of my mattress, my fingers resting on the keyboard of my loaner laptop, which is sitting in the middle of my rumpled bed.

My room looks like it’s been tossed by cops looking for illegal drugs.

The Millions-o-Books website is open on the computer—man, this thing really holds a charge—and I see my sleeping fingers have typed ausdfhpfppppppppppp into the search bar. I reach up to close the laptop lid and wince at the stretch. My God, everything hurts, including my head, which feels like I drank way too much last night.

But I don’t remember having a drop.

I do remember sitting at the table, hunched over the laptop, trying search after search until my eyes felt like someone had rubbed them full of sand. I remember getting up and going to my room to look for my paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice, which I’d carried to Professor Pedersen’s class just last week.

I remember not finding that, either.

I remember pawing through my dresser, my closet, my piles of dirty laundry looking for my “Talk Darcy to me” t-shirt. Could I have left it at my parents’ house the last time I visited?

And I remember emptying out my desk drawer trying to find the pin I got at a Jane Austen convention last year, proclaiming me to be a proud member of the Society of Obstinate Headstrong Girls (est. 1813). But it too seems to have vanished without a trace.