Cocktails with Jane

"If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad."

— Jane Austen

At the Coppa Club for cocktail hour, sipping prosecco with my girl Jane (Austen). I just bought the prettiest Chiltern edition of Emma, which felt fitting. Cher Horowitz remains one of my patron saints. I’m upstairs in the lounge, and it’s all so fabulous—leather-bound books, gilded mirrors, velvet everything. This place makes me feel like I’m becoming exactly who I’m meant to be.

Bath is a city of ghosts—Jane Austen’s, certainly. And Mary Shelley’s too. I visited her Frankenstein museum and learned she kept the calcified heart of her lover, Percy, in her writing desk. A physical relic of romantic suffering, kept beside a stack of his poems. If you dare go down to her basement, a house of horrors awaits. I barely made it past the steps before scrambling back upstairs.

Before taking the train in from London, Amy Winehouse had haunted me the entire time I roamed the streets of Camden. I’d turned down a random alleyway, suddenly finding myself upon a gigantic mural of Amy sprawled out on the side of a building. I walked into the place and realized it was the Hawley Arms, her favorite pub. The bartenders told me they’re throwing her a 40th birthday party that weekend, but I know I’ll be gone by then. I think of her often, how terribly misunderstood she’d been, how brilliantly talented. Her relationship with art was so pure, I didn’t realize until years after her death because of the harsh way the media portrayed her.

And I think about how men really do come out of the woodwork when you’re doing well. Amy had been so in love with Blake. It wasn’t until after her album Back to Black came out– that she’d had to write in order to survive a broken heart–that he’d suddenly been so committed and wanted to marry her (and eventually led her down a path of drug addiction).

It was that lesson spirit seemed to keep wanting me to learn: what the men I’d once lusted after were offering me wasn’t love, it was approval. It was a fleeting and anxiety-inducing thing to attempt to uphold–a thing of the ego, not of the soul.

And what hope was there for me, then? Is this just what happens to women writers? They create brilliant work... and die alone?

Or, they marry too soon and lose the solitude required to listen gently to the Muse?

To bathe uninterrupted?

To write?

To hear one’s own voice clearly?

Jane Austen herself was financially supported by her brother, but never married. She gave us

happy endings in fiction–engagements, promises–but was a spinster in reality. What a cruel irony: that

love, for many women artists, has historically been both a dream and an interruption.

Naturally, I google these questions, in an existential quest–an attempt to prophesize my fate.

Luckily, I stumble across some answers:

“Why unrequited love is good... For female artists throughout history, requited love often led to

marriage, children and the considerable burdens of domesticity, with a lot less time and space for their

creative work. There’s plenty of great gossip about the unrequited loves of Jane Austen and Emily

Dickinson, who never married. But those impossible crushes may have helped them grow as writers. They

could experience intense romantic feeling while remaining free to pursue their craft.”

Well, there you go.

There’s a loneliness here tonight, but also something sacred. A quiet in-between.

And in that quiet, I swear I can hear them: Jane, Mary, Amy.

“Write,” they whisper.

“Write,” they say louder.

"WRITE!" they scream.

“Or we’ll send you straight back to Mary Shelley’s basement!”

Noted.