My first move was to write to my mother telling her I was studying hard and not to worry about a thing. More than usually specious, this work of fiction helped get me in the mood for works of fiction composed by other people, such as Dickens
and Thackeray. But merely not feeling negative wasn’t the same as feeling positive. Enthusiasm was lacking. Why did it have to be Dickens and Thackeray? And why were Dickens’s novels so very long, not just in thickness but from page to page? He piled it on as if I had all the time in the world to take it off. Jane Austen had had a far better idea of how much time a busy poet and performer had to spare. There was also the advantage that in previous incarnations, while being an aesthete at the University of Sydney or a down-and-out post-Beatnik bohemian in Earls Court and Tufnell Park, I had actually read some of her books.
Acquiring a working knowledge of her oeuvre was thus on the cards. I resolved to concentrate on Jane Austen and thereby reap the benefits of the informed insight that cuts deep, the sharp focus. Whether a sharp focus on Jane Austen would come in handy when discussing the novel of, say, Dostoevsky, was a point that remained moot.
(Chapter 7)
Ballsing up the Swift paper set the tone for my whole effort in the [Tripos] examinations. The novel paper went only just better. With some ingenuity I answered the questions on the Russian novel by making references to nobody except Jane Austen, but there is a limit to who much you can say about D. H. Lawrence when you have read only
Pride and Prejudice.
(Chapter 9)
