The Dashwood Papers

By Janice Rossen

A cache of wickedly funny and searingly personal love letters have turned up in a Mayfair flat. Who will profit from them? Miranda, with American enthusiasm, suggests that the uneasy celebrity novelist and his literary agent go over together to meet the new owner. Of course, she will accompany them…plunging her into unforeseen adventures and an unexpectedly surprising paper-chase. Romantic anguish is one thing, but the possibility of a literary fraud is quite a different matter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781597055116

Book preview

What They Are Saying About

The Dashwood Papers

The Dashwood Papers is a vivid evocation of the precariousness of literary reputations. How accurate a picture does a writer’s archive give of his or her life, work and character? Why are writers often so edgy and neurotic and such liars? How much of their talent or even genius is founded on truth? In crackling dialogue, learned asides and subtle comments on the fantasies that often characterise Anglo-American relations, Janice Rossen explores important themes and passions in this ostensibly bright yet also darkly profound comedy.

—Max Egremont, award-winning biographer, author of The Glass Wall: Lives on the Baltic Frontier

A young woman who aspires to literary fame and a stash of letters relating to the life of a controversial artistic figure form the ingredients of this well-paced novel set in New York, London and Oxford.

Janice Rossen keeps the reader’s attention with her colourful narrative, embellished by descriptive flashbacks, as her lead characters clash and come together in intriguing relationships.

—Victoria Schofield, author, historian and

literary commentator

IMAGINATION, FEMINISM, drama, romance, and a sharp comic take on the vagaries and pretensions of the modern literary world. Janice Rossen's new novel has it all!

—Marcia Saunders, Writer, London

Literary life, archives, Anglo-American love and misunderstandings, the importance of good food and drink to promote harmony. Who could ask for more? It goes at a cracking pace, and I read it in a sitting. I plan to reread, with a pot of Royal Blend at the ready.

—Andrea Tanner, archivist and historian

The Dashwood Papers

Janice Rossen

A Wings ePress, Inc.

General Fiction Novel

Wings ePress, Inc.

Edited by: Jeanne Smith

Copy Edited by: Bev Haynes

Executive Editor: Jeanne Smith

Cover Artist: Trisha FitzGerald-Jung

All rights reserved

NAMES, CHARACTERS AND incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Wings ePress Books

www.wingsepress.com

Copyright © 2023 by: Janice Rossen

ISBN 978-1-61309-896-7

Published In the United States Of America

Wings ePress, Inc.

3000 N. Rock Road

Newton, KS 67114

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to University of Texas Press for permission to quote from Cable on Academe , and to cartoonist Carole Cable. She was kind enough to give me the original drawing, which I still possess.

My thanks also to Professor James Booth, who is admirably generous to everyone, and has superb editing skills. In this case, he excelled even himself. Some of the funniest lines in the novel are his.

Dedication

To James Booth, of shining intelligence and surpassing wit.

One

The sands running through the hourglass were down to the very last few grains, the candle burned almost down to the quick. But, Miranda thought, it could...just possibly...work?

She sighed, looking around her bare office. She was leaving today, in any case, and only one thing remained to take along with her: the cartoon with dreaming scholar, "I publish, therefore I am," still taped to her computer screen. This constant reproach to her failed academic ambitions summed up the classic conundrum: the successful New York literary agent who could never finish her own writing project.

Still, the email message—though exasperated in tone—affirmed what amounted to One Last Chance. The dissertation, begun ten years ago, still had four months until the definitive, official university deadline. She could still submit it...if she could finish it. It had been nearly done for ages, but always lacking what was to have been the centerpiece: reference to the subject’s original literary manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. How and why she had become so miserably disheartened—or distracted—Miranda could not say, even to herself. It had just seemed wrong, to have been derailed at virtually the last minute.

SHE SHIVERED, RECALLING the moment of incredulous disbelief at the wreck of all her plans...all those years ago, standing the Bodleian Reading Room...

I’m so sorry, but the archive is now closed to readers, said the earnest young librarian standing behind the desk. He fidgeted slightly with his tie but kept up a steady look of calm authority. A valiant white knight, nobly guarding England’s cultural heritage.

Miranda stood staring at him, the letter in her hand. But the literary executor has written to me...she gave me written permission to see them. Mrs. Agnes Tillotson, residing in Tunbridge Wells, had handwritten the letter, it was true, but surely typing was not required. She had professed herself delighted that someone should be interested in the writings of her beloved niece, the spirited young novelist who had been lost so tragically in the skiing accident of many years ago.

The second shock came when Miranda realized it was Adrian Dashwood who had apparently closed the archive.  No scholar would be allowed access to it.

But I just talked to Adrian last week, she stammered, still completely unable to take in the disappointment. We met each other in Austin at the Humanities Research Center. He was giving a lecture on... She fell silent, conscious that this was immaterial. She really must try to think clearly.

Perhaps—do you think?—if I rang him up, he might help me to explain to her?

I’m afraid it was Mr. Dashwood who insisted they be closed to readers until his biography appears.

"But he must have known that I was coming to Oxford."

MIRANDA AND DASHWOOD had met the previous week. Miranda—an enthusiastic and aspiring graduate student—could not believe her luck, that her week of reading papers should coincide with the lecture of a famous English novelist; moreover, a man who had been up at Oxford in the 1950s with Rosalind Galliard, her own cherished research topic. In the steaming Texas heat, stupefying even in the month of September, she shivered inside the air-conditioned reading room, turning over the pages of typescript on the desk before her. These were dry bones, she felt—mere shells of the novels which she always found so inspiring. But this was only the beginning...the Bodleian would surely be an Aladdin’s cave of alluring manuscripts, scribbled out in Rosalind’s own hand. Then the printed notice had appeared: Adrian Dashwood was to lecture at a faculty seminar that very week.

He had seemed to be dismissive when she had told him of her own project: A dissertation on Rosalind?—was she not rather a minor novelist? A few books, it’s true...perhaps, oddly, so deliberately quaint and provincial that Americans liked them.

Miranda defended her choice with spirit. Rosalind’s books were limited in number, to be sure, but look how many she had published in such a brief space of time. She had died at only thirty-two!—the same age as Fabritius, the famous painter in Delft, who might have been a second Vermeer if only.... She stopped short, wanting to burst into laughter at the sudden recollection of how much scheming she’d had to undertake in order to gain permission from her university for such a study to comprise the pinnacle of her PhD work. A fact she had not admitted aloud when proposing this choice to her disgruntled and impatient thesis supervisor, was that a dissertation on a single figure—and that writer without a great amount of scholarly waffle already published, to be waded through and argued with—would be much easier than undertaking another study of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, or constructing some solemn theoretical treatise on Modernism, interesting though that might be.

Feminist criticism, moreover, was rapidly gaining ground as a respectable line of literary study. Miranda reflected guiltily, yet again, that Rosalind’s novels were not even really feminist. However, she was a woman writer, and thus vaguely fit into an emerging category. And the point was, such a dissertation could well be seen to make a contribution to scholarship, especially since Galliard’s papers had just turned up in Oxford. She could be the first to read them. The unexpected gift of a travel scholarship for research from a women’s university auxiliary group—whom Miranda had charmed, with ecstatic romantic visions of long-ago undergraduate days at Oxford, where her literary heroine had begun her adventures—had seemed to confirm her choice. The few bits of publishing correspondence, typescripts and galley proofs which had landed in the archives in Austin would be nothing, in comparison with the journals, letters and perhaps even early handwritten drafts which had been deposited in the Bodleian.

There would have been considerably fewer books without me—I typed them all and sent them off to be published, Adrian continued, ... a nerve-wracking business in the days long before faxes, personal computers, laptops. Everything went through the post, then. My only reward was to meet up with her, wherever she was staying on the continent, with the latest set of page proofs to be corrected. His eyes narrowed, as though at some past memory.

Gosh! I know very little about her life—though I’m hoping to find out more. All of her papers have ended up at the Bodleian, and I’m going to Oxford next week, in fact, to read them. Of course, she added scrupulously, it won’t be a biography, but a critical study of the novels. I’m mostly interested in the books themselves, and in the creative process. Miranda reflected again that the real glory of this scholarly enterprise was the chance to go to England, where she had, as yet, never been, despite an overwhelming and rueful passion for English literature. I find it fascinating that Rosalind wrote so much about England, when she seems to have spent so much of her life abroad.

The curse of the expat—Rosalind couldn’t wait to get away from England, but she didn’t realize she’d be riveted to thinking about it afterwards. In most of her letters, she kept begging us to come out and join her, though, naturally, we continued imploring her to come back to England. We few, we happy few, he murmured, with an affected, languid air.

I’m even going to stay in an Oxford college, Miranda went on, intent on her own glorious future unfolding before her in only a matter of days. Well, to be fair, it was to be only a student room rented out from one of the colleges as a bed-and-breakfast for summer visitors, but still...if she were getting to Oxford several years too late, and from the other side of the Atlantic, at least she was going to be there at last. All of that wishing, upon various stars along the way, might be about to pay off: this would be a dream coming true.

Sitting with Adrian at the café in the cavernous university student union was still more satisfying, as one step along this path to bygone days of Oxford undergraduate glory. She did not know whether it would be polite to ask him about his own work. The lecture he had just given had concentrated primarily on the magic theatrical circle in which he had been privileged, he said, to have been included—while simultaneously appearing to feel entirely at home with this distinction. His own literary fame, as he alluded to it modestly, had burst into startling and immediate prominence with the publication of a spectacularly successful first novel in the late 1960s. This had been followed by a steady stream of novels, biographies, essays and radio dramas—these last being a tribute to the Oxford days, he admitted, in his lecture—and this virtuosity in so many genres had made him a glamourous figure on the London literary scene.

But the American audience of town and gown had mostly seemed to want to know about his connections with other famous writers. Had he ever met C.P. Snow? And did he consider his own career to have parallels with that of Kingsley Amis, who had succeeded so brilliantly with a first novel, which took him straight to the top? Did Adrian consider himself to be an Angry Young Man?

The slightly pained look on his face while he parried these queries made her suspect that Englishmen—however authoritatively eminent in a professional sense—disliked this covert reference to class distinction. The Americans crowded into the room were clearly identifying themselves with what they perceived as the most sophisticated stratum of British culture. Good Lord, sweet and also dry sherry! Set out on the wooden conference table in cut-glass decanters! She would ask him about Rosalind after the others had gone.

His invitation to drink coffee together, when she had managed to speak to him following the conclusion of the lecture, had thrilled her. And...did you know Rosalind Galliard? she had asked eagerly when Adrian had finally turned to face her as she stood in line to speak with him. I’m reading her papers, she added.

Adrian was leaving for England the following day, and expressed his regrets that he could not invite her out to dine with him that evening. The Texas professors, you know! A little dinner party, in my honor...couldn’t possibly disappoint them. But half an hour’s conversation over weak coffee in the student union had given Miranda the most blissful gift of all.

Next week, I think you said? Adrian repeated.

Arriving at the Bodleian on Tuesday morning. As soon as I can get my library admission card printed.

Ring me when you get to Oxford, he said, scribbling a phone number onto a small card produced from his wallet.

THE CARD HAD REMAINED her magic talisman and was still in her purse. She wondered whether to ring him up straight away. Her knees were trembling, and she felt sick to her stomach.

The kind-hearted librarian, when Miranda’s dilemma was explained to him, had pointed out the shelves full of catalogues where she might look for other archives to consult. But, my travel grant... she started to say, her eyes filling with tears. It’s for this particular project. I don’t know how I could very well start on something else, with no background on it.

She leafed disconsolately through a succession of the bound books filled with the archivists’ detailed typescript lists and notations, taking down the files at random from the shelves. Literary options—in particular theatrical connections—included the Gilbert Murray papers (an Oxford don in the early part of the twentieth century, said the librarian, who did translations of classical repertoire).

I have got little Latin and less Greek, Miranda thought bitterly. Papers of Tolkien or C.S. Lewis might also be viewed—at least they were 20th century authors. Or perhaps she might consider an 18th century aesthete who had written a famous gothic novel?

"I don’t do eighteenth century! she said, miserably. But I can’t ring up Adrian until I stop weeping with rage."

At half past noon, Adrian himself strolled into the reading room. Miranda, my dear! So, you’ve arrived!

She leaped awkwardly to her feet, knocking her pencil onto the floor, and shook his hand—which he followed by giving her a kiss on both cheeks.

I’m wondering...would you like to come with me to lunch?

AT LEAST HE WAS TREATING her to a slap-up meal, thought Miranda, still in a daze. The quaint, stone 16th century building—now a hotel and restaurant after its earlier incarnation centuries ago as a parsonage—had a fireplace with real logs burning in it when they arrived, and he had booked a table in advance. She sat on the plush, dark velvet cushions and tried to eat a bit of the salmon fishcake which he had urged upon her as a first course. He was still droning on, with apologies that meant nothing.

Awfully sorry about all that...I did send you a letter saying don’t bother to come. Did you not receive it?

No, she said forcefully. There would hardly have been time for an airmail letter to have gone across the Atlantic. "I came on here straight from Austin. Besides, everything was arranged—it took weeks to organize it all. Was it not right, then, to have written to Mrs. Tillotson for permission? I mean, she is the literary executor."

Well, as it happens, I’ve been appointed as joint executor. The old girl felt, in the end, that the responsibility was too much to handle. Besides, I understand the manuscripts have not yet been catalogued—it takes quite a while, you know—special boxes and folio numbering—and the librarians clearly had other priorities.

But you’re going to read them yourself!

Ah, in due course...besides, I’m afraid that was the advice of my agent, you see. More or less usual, in these cases...don’t want some clever scholar scooping us. Quite usual, he emphasized.

Miranda felt the room reel around her slightly as she considered these statements. She gazed at the moisture beading up on the outside of her glass of white wine. Bastard. Why hadn’t he told me last week?

You’re going to do a biography of Rosalind? she asked, finally. But I thought you didn’t think very much of her work.

Oh...ah...more of a...group portrait, I suppose. Our little clan, the Players and our readings. Ian is now quite a well-known director—

"What am I going to do, then?" she wailed.

Well, actually, I have an idea about that, if it would amuse you?

The suggestion, sketched out over a delicious beef tenderloin with black peppercorn sauce, gained credence from the excellence of the food—in addition to the glass of cabernet which appeared on the table along with it.

A three-month internship, he was saying. My agent in London is arranging the details now.

London? she said, conscious of sounding stupid and uncomprehending. She had wanted to be in Oxford, not London.

"We rather thought that...an American point of view—"

"But I love English literature! she protested. She mentally rehearsed her stock answer to friends who quibbled with this monomania: What have the English got? Shakespeare...kings and battles and soliloquies. What have we got? Moby Dick, a story about a whale."

By the time a sparkling and heady ginger sorbet had appeared on the table, she had allowed herself to be half convinced. At the least, she could stay in London for three months. She tried to think reasonably—her one clear feeling about it was that the offer must be seized immediately, or not at all. She could hardly bear the thought of climbing onto a plane to fly back to America.

I’ll have to give back the travel grant money, she said sorrowfully, almost in tears again. But I suppose they couldn’t really object? If the papers have been closed, there is no chance I can fulfill the terms of the contract. Do the work, she amended, as that was what truly counted.

I believe there is a small salary attached to the position, dear girl. I’d like to make it up to you, if I can?

AND NOW, TEN YEARS had passed and no biography from Adrian’s pen had appeared. Miranda had worked in fits and starts on the dissertation, unable either to complete it or to finally let it go, though every once in a while filling in new references. To her possessive and envious fury, other scholars had begun to publish on Galliard’s novels.

The London internship had, in one sense, been miraculously lucky, as it had led to a job at a literary agency in New York—without her ever having had to complete the dreaded dissertation project. While she was half ashamed of her success, Miranda also admitted to herself that a specialty in romance novels—a niche genre, but lucrative—was a brilliant fit for an anglophile American from the Midwest, who had spent her teenage years reading novels by Georgette Heyer and Mary Stewart.

But now she had six months’ leave from work—unpaid, but carefully saved for—and...as it appeared from the curt email message on her computer screen, four months in which to send in her completed thesis. She picked up the phone and dialed the travel section of the office—surely the literary agency could do her this one final courtesy of arranging her flight. She would pay for it herself—she’d been saving up, in some sense, for exactly this eventuality. The desk in front of her was bare, her apartment sublet. She had, in fact, nowhere else to go.

A ticket to London, she said into the phone in a decisive voice. Departing tomorrow, please...no, make it a flight on Sunday. That would give her a whole day in which to pack.

And...no return date. One-way.

Two

I want to find Adrian , Miranda announced, slightly too loudly, in a desperate effort to sound self-confident. I understand you are representing him now?

She had fibbed slightly—crossing her fingers behind her back, for luck—to get in to see the cheerful young man sitting across the desk from her. By announcing herself as coming from the well-known New York agency, she had gotten past the dragons at the front desk of the literary agency on Regent Street. Fortunately, she had remembered Nigel’s name from something Adrian had once said, which lent credence to her imperious claim to speak with him, though she had never met him. She had gone directly to the Savoy in a taxi from Victoria Station, amusing herself with visions of grandeur—but, while she could certainly not afford to stay there, it provided a glorious moment of savoir vivre to sit in the elegant lounge and drink