All Roads Lead to Austen Read Online Free

her birthplace of Steventon to Bath, some beach vacations to Lyme Regis, a few trips to London—and always accompanied by family. Americans are so enamored of “finding ourselves” that it’s hard to imagine life in a culture where your place, who you are, is defined first and foremost by family. What would it be like never to feel driven to ask the questions that keep American therapists busy? To have a true and profound sense of belonging? You can find close communities in the States, but these days you have to look hard.
    Maybe Austen would translate just fine for Antiguans. Maybe they’d be able to understand her better than a restless traveler like me or that high-spirited young girl disappearing through the crowd in the Parque Central.
    ***
    Monday morning dawned—back to school! I was always one of those nerds who looked forward to school starting, to breaking in crisp new notebooks, color-coded by subject, to using shiny new pens. I remember with vivid intensity the childhood pleasure of stepping back into the classroom after a summer of sunburns and roughhousing. Returning to La Escuela that July morning felt the same, seeing the motivated morning bustle, checking to find which cubicle I’d been assigned, which teacher.
    If you seriously want to learn another language and can pull together the cash, attend an immersion school with one-on-one instruction. Finding a pretty one, while you’re at it, is easy to do in Antigua since most have outdoor classrooms. The grounds at La Escuela were idyllic. Neat cement paths wove between the beds of well-tended flowers and bushes that separated the three long rows of outdoor study cubicles. At capacity, the school accommodated dozens of students, but the layout and the semienclosed cubicles allowed for the sense of privacy you find in a well-designed restaurant. The school was enchanting—nothing like fresh air and flowers to make a classroom more pleasant.
    As for teachers, I’d requested Luis, a man known for both his profound love of literature and his bile, especially toward women. I’d seen him during my initial five-week visit back in the winter but had never spoken to him. Unlike most of the teachers at La Escuela , Luis, who was fiftyish, simply didn’t look friendly. His expressions were sharp, his features and the tone of his voice were sharp, the lines of his slender body, sharp, and his mind, as I came to see over the course of the week, sharpest of all. When students and teachers would gather for coffee breaks, he tended to hang back and watch the others—and I was intrigued.
    Thinking about Luis’s reputation led me to remember how one of Austen’s neighbors compared Jane to a fireplace poker: an ever-present part of the furnishings, silent, stiff and upright, sharp and dangerous. This doesn’t exactly square, however, with the many descriptions by Austen’s nieces and by friends who found her pleasant and fun. In all likelihood the comparison to a poker had less to do with Austen being a cold bit of hardware than with the neighbor in question feeling roundly and soundly jabbed by Austen’s now-famous wit.
    A colleague from my university who’d already studied with Luis had asked me to bring him half a dozen novels in English as a gift. Luis eyed the stack I placed on the desk between us with thinly concealed desire as I introduced myself. Clearly he was a book person to the core, no doubt thinking, “Mary, mother of God, why can’t I run home with these books right now? Why must I work for a living?” Every time I hear about somebody who wins a never-work-again sum in the lottery but keeps his or her day job I think, not a book person.
    I don’t fear death—I fear dying before I’ve read Dickens end to end.
    Luis posed some standard questions and I worked through the answers: born in Pennsylvania, job in California, two brothers, one sister, mother living, father