Invisible Sister

By Mary E. Wells

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 "Pride and Prejudice." Controversy follows the discovery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098397524

Book preview

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 pestered by what she was coming to regard as the Fuller Phenomenon, which had a pleasing alliteration while sounding less like obsession. Fuller had moved in rather exalted circles, published well regarded books and scores of articles, and became the first fulltime book reviewer in America when she joined Horace Greeley’s staff at the New York Tribune. That Fuller had accomplished so much by age 34 despite her thorny personality and multiple maladies prompted Alexa’s curiosity about the woman and, she grudgingly admitted, could be the allure feeding Justin’s claims of her obsession.

Fuller’s unusual biography had led Alexa to her latest story idea, to focus on Margaret Fuller’s remarkable body of work, produced despite a history of what some described as frequent debilitating migraine headaches. Biographers also hinted at manic/depressive behavior, spasms, vertigo and nightmares while in later years Fuller herself wrote that the interminable lessons in her youth prevented the harmonious development of her bodily powers, producing terrible eyesight along with the other ills. Simply overcoming that chain of maladies, Alexa thought, would make Fuller’s story interesting to the magazine’s readers.

Alexa wanted to balance Fuller’s ill health with current-day afflictions brought on by the stresses of contemporary life; illness most often addressed with the pain killers and anti-anxiety medications people relied on just to make it through a day. She would compare that with nervous disorders women were said to suffer from in Fuller’s era of the 1820s through 1850, a time when few remedies were available. It was a way to study Fuller’s work habits yet compare her struggles to modern day stress disorders. Alexa thought Justin would go for this story over the others she had pitched, because of the present-day applicability. She figured half the staff at 608 took anxiety medication of some sort, an indictment of modern culture, she thought, though sometimes she wished her editor, referred to by most of the writers as Mad Maud, would avail herself of something to lighten her moods.

Shaking herself loose from her reverie, Alexa continued her argument for the article. This time she was determined to be relentless; she’d keep talking until her boss could not fail to see the possibilities of the article’s appeal. Facing him across a desk strewn with competing magazines and an array of Sunday papers, Alexa knew he would come around if she could hit just the right theme to shake him out of his opposition.

Here’s the connection, she told Justin, jolting his attention away from the trout stream and back to the matter at hand. Fuller was a smart, driven woman wanting to have it all—success as a thinker and writer in a man’s world, but also a woman who cherished the romantic longing for a special person in her life. Have we changed much? She didn’t give him time to answer that, not wanting Justin to see any similarities with her own life. There are enough parallels to modern times to entertain readers and enough medical savvy among them to understand the impact Fuller’s health problems would have on her life. There’s real drama to her story, not just dull facts.

I get that she struggled to have a career but it still sounds too academic and boring.

I don’t intend to repeat what scholars have already covered so well about Fuller as an intellectual, though I might touch on her fascination with Ralph Waldo Emerson or her novel-worthy dreadful death. No, what intrigues me is that despite many references to her wretched health, she had such an active and productive life. I’d like to investigate what might have been the physical causes of her bouts of illness, but more importantly, about her ability to overcome them to produce an incredible literary output. What’s intriguing about Fuller is not so much her scholarly body of work but that she had any career at all given her health.

And you absolutely have to go to Jamesford to do that?

That’s Johnsford, Justin, a small town on the Connecticut River north of Amherst, Massachusetts, not Jamesford, if there even is such a place.

Don’t be pedantic Alexa. The name of the town is irrelevant. What I mean is, you think this requires a research expedition? That Justin had moved from denying her article to questioning about the research required for it gave Alexa hope.

That’s the location where a collection of Fuller-related papers is housed, at a museum there. From my understanding, this collection, what had been her brother’s papers, has been mostly ignored by scholars of Fuller. So yes, I think the trip is necessary.

The mention of Amherst had given Cabot and idea. So you’ll be close to Amherst and Dickinson country. If your idea doesn’t pan out I have an alternate avenue to pursue. Alexa was surprised Justin had any kind of related story in mind but decided to delay questioning him about it. Maybe he would be convinced by her arguments and drop whatever idea had occurred to him.

Justin, you know I can wring emotion out of just about any subject. If I can bring people to tears writing about a mortgage program that gets families into a home of their own, you know I can make this article meaningful.

I’m well aware of your writing skills but regardless, I’m skeptical about your certainty that people will take any interest in Fuller. I’m bored listening to you and can’t imagine anyone slogging through a full article. Alexa’s internal critic said she doubted Justin could imagine much beyond what fast food he’d have for lunch but also warned her to keep quiet. She liked her boss but found him intellectually incurious.

Early on Justin had admitted he knew nothing of Fuller prior to Alexa’s repeated attempts to prod him to approve the first of her article ideas. After hearing her quote sources on Fuller he supposed there were already too many biographies of her. He imagined all of them gathering dust in university libraries, having last been checked out sometime in the waning term of the Bush administration. Tired of hearing Alexa pontificate on Fuller being ‘the toast of the Transcendental writers and the first woman ever to be allowed to use the Harvard library,’ he was considering the health angle and what could turn the story into something that might not totally bore readers or, even better, might force Alexa to drop her obsession with Fuller entirely. To get a few more minutes to work out the details in his head, he decided to keep Alexa talking.

It still sounds dull. Over the years the magazine has published its share of educational pieces and most of them were, if not ignored then appreciated by a tiny segment of our readers. What makes you think this one won’t suffer the same fate? Justin knew his wordy writer could expound at length, giving him time to further develop his story idea.

Taking a moment to arrange her thoughts to present the best argument, Alexa reflected on what would make her boss see the project from her perspective. In her estimation Justin wasn’t a bad publisher but he wasn’t an enthusiastic or creative one either. He had majored in literature in college but never attempted to appreciate any female authors. This Alexa knew from discussions of reading habits and favorite authors. Where her choices were eclectic, Justin’s bookshelves were filled with the top ten names in American literature—male names—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne. His favorite was Mark Twain, certainly a classic but one that required nothing from Justin in the way of critical evaluation.

Not long after Justin became publisher at the magazine after the death of his father she had taunted him about his favorite. Everybody likes Twain, she had told him. "A typical guys’ author but pedestrian, don’t you think? Why not explore writers with more of an edge? You’re young, why stick with the names you’d find in the old Authors card game pack? Read Tom Robbins or Derek B. Miller for fiction, or Erik Larson for history that reads like gritty fiction. Or Matt Taibbi, an incredible investigative journalist who writes facts with a passion and humor I’ve rarely seen and intensely envy. It’s time to broaden your horizons, Justin."

His response was typical Justin. You presume I want grit, passion and intensity. Anybody looking at her boss at that moment would be compelled to concede Justin didn’t exemplify any of the three descriptors. Looking younger than his actual age, he had a boyish charm that was not unlikable and a pleasant smile but a lack of fire within that seemed to fade his dark good looks. Since getting to know Justin, Alexa had tried to kindle a spark by suggesting reading matter more challenging and current. She had trod this path before, making suggestions but always getting to the same spot with Justin, who, she suspected, would rather be knee deep in a trout stream than publishing a magazine. He would shrug, admit he had a great appreciation for the classics and didn’t feel compelled to explore other authors, his intellectual curiosity always at low ebb.

Thus, Alexa had known it would be a push to get Justin to agree to her Fuller pitch. A wordy article focused on an opinionated female author was as far away from Justin’s interests as Alexa’s were from her publisher’s. Ten years his senior, she once told him she was making a living writing while he was still trying to sneak into R-rated movies. Her blunt, cheeky remarks, rather than getting her fired from 608 (the area code of the magazine’s original coverage), was what Justin liked about Alexa and what he encouraged in her writing. Justin knew the magazine’s readers had been applauding Alexa’s articles long before he’d taken over from his father. So Alexa undaunted in pushing her Fuller piece was what he expected.

After Alexa’s penultimate appeal in the vein of Don’t you trust my instincts by now?Justin finally appeared to take an interest. Alexa hoped she’d penetrated his resistance to Fuller only to have her kernel of an idea popped by his next question.

Wasn’t Emily Dickinson also sickly? And Jane Austen died relatively young, right? If he had produced a dummy cover blurbing the article she could not have been any more certain where this was headed and it wasn’t where she wanted to go. What he proposed for the article’s title made Alexa want to stab him repeatedly with the No. 2 Dixon Ticonderoga he had been tapping relentlessly.

"’Love Sick’? You want me to write about ailing spinster female authors? That’s so sexist, Justin, you can’t be serious. Please don’t do this. Don’t make this about women writers wasting away for lack of a husband."

Justin, leaning back in his chair, pretended that boredom was soon to put an end to the discussion and replied, If you want to do this article, and spend my money to go to some museum in Massachusetts, you’ve got to sex it up a bit. Justin grinned at this idea. Maybe I should have said un-sex it since those women apparently weren’t into that. In any case, you’ll do the three or you’ll do none. Thinking he had won the argument Justin searched the top of his desk for a clean sheet of paper to make notes of the discussion.

Alexa stifled the urge to face palm, feeling like she was getting a migraine just listening to Justin and seeing her serious article transformed into a treacly treatise on unrequited love. She could see the cover tease: ‘Famous Spinster Authors of the 1800s.’ Not willing to admit it was obsession driving her yet disinclined to let go of her idea no matter what the potential outcome, Alexa was not about to compromise. Pulling a sheet from her notebook, she scratched a few lines and tossed it to Justin, ready to fight back with her final feint.

"That’s my counter offer. I’ll pursue your article with one stipulation: let me do the research on Fuller at the Johnsford Museum. If whatever they have stored there doesn’t turn up anything useful for my article, I’ll do your version with the three women. Amherst isn’t far from Johnsford so I could do research on Dickinson there before finishing with Austen, which I assume won’t include a trip to England. Alexa could see traces of triumph about to overtake Justin’s normally placid face. Her final condition put an end to that. However, if there’s anything at the museum to support the original article I’ve proposed then it will be Fuller alone. I’m confident enough in being able to dig up something that, if I don’t, I’ll pay my expenses. Deal?"

Knowing Justin had never bought a lottery ticket or played poker, Alexa expected him to decline. He wasn’t a gambler. She was betting on something existing in Fuller’s old files to win the article she wanted and was willing to risk the wager. Surprisingly, so was Justin.

Work out the details with Maud and get at it. The sooner you get over this romance with a 200 year-old forgotten author the better. He waved her away and continued making notes.

Choosing silent discretion over a caustic reply to that last comment, Alexa exited Justin’s office to confront the next obstacle, the inevitable confrontation with her editor. Maud Wallace was a woman in her sixties whose life was the magazine. Rumored to have numerous ex-husbands and at least one estranged offspring, the bet was a miserable personal life had generated her ill temper and odd personal habits. Still, Alexa considered her the best editor she’d encountered. Maud’s absolute dedication to weeding out lazy journalese had impressed Alexa from the day she began at 608. Maud may not have loved people but she loved words and was ruthless in insisting the writers in her fold take good care when using them.

People who had worked with her over the years referred to her as Mad Maud behind her back because of her perpetually bad temper. They left cautionary notes for newbies to find in their desks, warning never to ask Maud about her personal life or they would run the risk of having their first dozen articles brutally sliced to ribbons by Maud’s sharp editing.

Maud was fastidious, not to the point of being prissy, but in a zealously streamlined way. Her clothes had simple lines, no patterns, were mostly gray and never adorned with accessories. Alexa thought of it as minimalist dressing with nothing extraneous. Some co-workers wondered if her underwear was the same gray as her clothes but Alexa avoided that type of speculation. Even her hair, which had been ginger at one time, had followed Maud’s fade to gray by evolving to a somber battleship tone. Because nobody on staff had ever been invited to Maud’s house it was easy to imagine her in a monochromatic home, each piece of furniture precisely aligned, with the arrangement never altered and not so much as a pen or book out of place. There would be no scent of home baked dessert or the perfume of flowers in her house. Rather, the vague essence of furniture polish would linger in the stagnant air; a sterile environment for a colorless woman.

The one deviation in this portrait was a set of gel pens in neon colors that Maud used to mark up copy. She would not edit online, professing to dislike computers for anything other than email and Google. She insisted on printing articles and rainbowing them with her pens. To Alexa it was as if all the color that might have been in Maud’s actual life was contained in those pens, let loose only when it flowed onto the pages in front of her.

Alexa’s relationship with Maud had begun inauspiciously right from their introduction when Maud commented that Alexa was an unusual name, the tone of voice saying strange rather than interesting. Thinking to make light of it, Alexa replied that when her mother was pregnant, she’d seen Alex Trebek on television, way before his reign on Jeopardy, and had been captivated by him. Hoping