By Catherine Keenan |
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Arielle Eckstut, 33, literary agent
Not long after her extraordinary discovery of the lost sex scenes of Jane Austen, Arielle Eckstut went on radio to discuss her find. She was joined by the president of the Jane Austen Society of North America, and a mysterious academic called Dr Elfrida Drummond. Both listened, enthralled, as Eckstut recounted the moment when, in a "grand manor" in Britain, she was battling to open an old window and accidentally dislodged a small wooden box that had been hidden there for almost two centuries.
Inside was something beyond imagining: pages and pages covered in an exacting hand, detailing sex scenes between Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, Charlotte and Mr Collins, a not entirely successful encounter between Knightley and Churchill from Emma, and more. Austen, an author famed for her control over the unsaid, had apparently said it all, in explicit detail, but the scenes had been excised by a hidebound editor. Austen's heated correspondence with him was in the box, too.
A devotee of Austen's books, Eckstut was astonished and delighted by her discovery, and published a book, Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen. It was introduced by "the most conservative of all modern Austen scholars", the Oxford-based Drummond, who announced that Eckstut had taken the accepted picture of the great author and turned it on its head. The radio station was inundated with calls from people wanting to find out more, and Eckstut was contacted by a doctoral student at Oxford University, who said he couldn't find Dr Drummond listed on the faculty records. Could Eckstut please supply him with contact details?
Very gently - though with some satisfaction - Eckstut pointed out to the young man that the radio program was broadcast on April 1. Dr Elfrida Drummond was, she explained, a fictitious character played by Eckstut's husband. Eckstut has indeed published a book of sex scenes between the most famous of Austen's characters, but it is a parody, "a loving homage".
Mr Darcy hadn't really "put his hands on Elizabeth's breasts and pushed up each soft globe so that both were near escaping the rim of her chemise". And Austen certainly didn't write about Charlotte dressing up in one of Lady Catherine de Bourgh's old dresses, giving Mr Collins a sound whipping while he crouched on all fours barking "I have been very, very bad! May I please have another!"
The doctoral student was by no means the first to be taken in. "A number of editors called and thought it was the real thing," says Eckstut. "I like to try and keep them going for a little while, saying, 'Oh my God, it was so amazing when I found it'."
Are they embarrassed when they find out the truth? "Absolutely," she laughs.
Eckstut, 33, is a literary agent and no stranger to writing about sex. Her husband, David Sterry, was a gigolo in his teens and wrote a memoir, Chicken. She has written about sex - and about being married to an ex-gigolo - for various publications.
The idea for this book came from a friend. "He just said, off the cuff, 'Wouldn't it be hysterical if someone found the lost sex scenes of Jane Austen?"' Eckstut had been a fan of Austen since she received a hard-bound copy of Emma for her 11th, or possibly 12th, birthday. "And I still have that copy, and I used it to do the research for the book."
When she decided not to go on to graduate work, she thought she put paid to her dream of writing about Austen: without a PhD, no one would take her seriously. "So when I heard this, I was like, 'This is my opportunity'."
She spent six months rereading all Austen's books, some of the literary criticism and a biography. "Then I got very, very detailed, and I started making vocabulary lists of words that I saw that were used over and over again. I studied the way she put together a sentence."
It was daunting trying to imitate one of the greatest prose stylists in the language. "And I don't make any claims to have done it in any way near what Jane Austen did. As someone who had read the works over and over again, I did a decent job capturing that tone, but I think that it doesn't come near her work."
Still, the president of the Jane Austen Society of North America has endorsed the book as "wickedly funny". Not so other Austen fans, who have been outraged by the idea of an actual sex scene between Lizzy Bennet and Mr Darcy. Even Andrew Davies, famed for injecting sex into the classics, stopped short of that in his BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Just having Colin Firth emerge from the water in a clinging shirt was enough to cause palpitations in Austen's female fans across the globe.
"There's a lot of older ladies who read her as romance reading. And I think that sector across the world just thinks it's the most disgusting thing," Eckstut says.
She defends it as a homage to Austen's wit. "There's a rich tradition in English literature, from Pope to Swift up through the ages, where parody takes people's characters and turns them on their head."
A.S. Byatt had no truck with this line of argument, however, and condemned the book on BBC radio as intrusive, crass, "very, very third rate", and an insult to the imagination of readers. In a tone of patrician disdain, she intoned: "If you were a really good writer, you'd invent your own characters, and your own world, and your own scenes. I think it's the piggybacking I don't like. It's parasitical. It's like being a flea."
"Wow," Eckstut responded. "Good parodies have always made people angry." Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen, by Arielle Eckstut, is published by Canongate, $24.95.
"There's a lot of older ladies who read [Austen] as romance reading. And I think [they] just think it's the most disgusting thing."
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