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By Root 1315 0

kitchen, helping with the other wives and girlfriends. She could have refused to do this, of course, but then she’d only look as if she was trying to prove a point. Also, it was annoying to sit and listen to the men’s competitive discussions. And so she washed dishes and ended up resenting it. Her only other social interactions were playing tennis with Malkiel’s young wife, Greta—who treated Madeleine like a hitting coach—or hanging out with the other bedfellows. That was the term used for the partners of the research fellows: bedfellows. Nearly every single research fellow was a guy. Most of the senior biologists were male as well, and so there was only Diane MacGregor, if you didn’t count the lab techs, for Madeleine to root for and to try, in her own fashion, to imitate.

Considering that Leonard’s fellowship covered their food and lodging, there was no reason Madeleine couldn’t spend all her time reading, sleeping, and eating. But she had no intention of doing that. Despite her lack of focus over the summer, her future in academia had received a boost. Along with an A on her honors thesis, Madeleine had received a personal note from Professor Saunders encouraging her to turn her thesis into a shorter paper and to forward it to one M. Myerson at The Janeite Review. “It just may be publishable!” Saunders had written. Though the fact that M. Myerson was, in fact, Professor Saunders’s wife, Mary, lent an air of nepotism to this recommendation, an in was still an in. In Saunders’s office, when Madeleine had stopped by to see him, he had also loudly decried Yale’s rejection of her, saying that she’d been a victim of intellectual fashion.

Then, on a mid-September weekend, Madeleine attended a conference on Victorian literature at Boston College that pointed her in a new direction. At the conference, which was held at a Hyatt with a greenery-filled lobby and tubular glass elevators, she met two people as crazy about nineteenth-century books as she was. Meg Jones was a fit college softball pitcher with pixieish hair and a strong jaw. Anne Wong was a ponytailed Stanford grad with an Elsa Peretti heart necklace, a Seiko watch, and a faint accent of her native Taiwan. Anne was currently in the poetry M.F.A. program at the University of Houston but was planning to get a Ph.D., in English, in order to make a living and satisfy her parents. Meg was already in the Ph.D. program at Vanderbilt. She called Austen “the divine Jane,” and spouted facts and figures about her like a sports bettor. There had been eight children in Austen’s family, Jane the youngest girl. She had suffered from Addison’s disease, like John F. Kennedy. She came down with typhus in 1783. Sense and Sensibility was originally published as Elinore and Marianne. Austen once accepted a proposal of marriage from a man named Bigg-Wither, but after sleeping on it, she changed her mind. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral.

“Are you thinking of going into Austen studies?” Anne Wong asked Madeleine.

“I don’t know. I had a chapter on her in my thesis. But you know who I’m also into? It’s a little embarrassing.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Gaskell.”

“I love Mrs. Gaskell!” Anne Wong cried.

“Mrs. Gaskell?” Meg Jones said. “I’m trying to think of something to reply to that.”

What Madeleine sensed at the conference was the emergence of a new class of academics. They were talking about all the old books she loved, but in new ways. The topics included: “Women of Property in the Victorian Novel,” “Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question,” “Masturbation in Victorian Literature,” and “The Prison of Womanhood.” Madeleine and Anne Wong heard Terry Castle give a paper on “the invisible lesbian” in Victorian literature, and they glimpsed, from a distance, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar coming out of a “Madwoman in the Attic” talk where there were no seats left.

The thing about the Victorians, Madeleine was learning, was that they were a lot less Victorian than you thought. Frances Power Cobbe had lived openly with another woman, referring to her as her “wife.” In 1868, Cobbe had published