First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen Read Free

the first drafts of three of her novels. She would have loved to go, but not with him, and in any case she couldn’t help laughing at his transparency.
    “Does that work?” she asked.
    “Does what work?”
    “That ploy. You find out a girl’s favorite author and then offer to drive her to Jane Austen’s birthplace, or George Orwell’s gravesite, or Charles Dickens’s favorite pub.”
    “I don’t like Dickens.”
    “How can you not like Dickens?”
    “All that poverty. It depresses me. At least Austen’s heroines end up in nice big houses.”
    “Setting aside the fact that I find you disagreeable,” said Sophie, “the truth is I have plans tomorrow.”
    “Oh, I don’t think you find me disagreeable,” said Eric.
    “Then how do you think I find you?”
    “I think you’re intrigued by me—and even though I’m rude and generally unpolished, you think you might have finally met someone who appreciates Jane Austen as much as you do.”
    “When I heard you the other night, my first impression was that you were a prat,” said Sophie, annoyed that he had so accurately guessed what she was thinking. She had dated Clifton for two years and he
never
knew what she was thinking. This guy had known her for twenty minutes and he could read her like a book. It was unnerving.
    “First impressions can be misleading,” said Eric. “Just ask Eliza Bennet. Come to Steventon with me.”
    “I have plans.”
    “What plans?”
    “I have to go home for the weekend. My mother’s having a . . . thing.”
    “A thing?”
    “A garden thing,” said Sophie. “It’s a sculpture show. My mother is a bit obsessive about her garden. She thinks it’s the finest in Oxfordshire.”
    “What sort of things does she grow?”
    “Latin things,” she said. “English names aren’t good enough for my mother. Everything is Latin.” She hadn’t meant to sound quite so harsh. Sophie actually liked her mother’s use of Latin—it reminded her of her Uncle Bertram reading Horace to help her fall asleep when she was a girl.
    “I take it you’re not a gardener,” said Eric.
    “I like to
read
in the garden,” said Sophie, “and I can tell a flower from a shrubbery and a shrubbery from a tree, but my thumb has always been distinctly black.”
    “And your father?”
    “What about my father?”
    “What sort of chap is he?” asked Eric.
    “Oh, really, don’t use the word ‘chap.’ You’re American; don’t try to pretend otherwise.”
    “Sorry, what sort of bloke is he?”
    Sophie rolled her eyes. “He likes to shoot things. They’re quite the pair, my parents. Mother only wants to grow things and Father only wants to kill them.”
    “Sounds like you don’t like them very much.”
    “Mother and I get on well enough,” she said. “She’s not much of a reader, but we like to sit in the kitchen and talk all morning over coffee. I don’t get to do that as often as I used to.” It suddenly struck Sophie that, in spite of her apathy about her mother’s garden, she was really looking forward to the morning
after
the sculpture show, when she and her mother could have one of their long relaxing talks.
    “So it’s your father you don’t like. Is he just annoying or is it something worse?”
    Eric’s question cut a little too close to the bone, so she turned the conversation on him.
    “What about you? Are you on one of those American university study abroad programs?” she asked.
    “Hardly,” he said. “I’m a little old for that.” He explained that after getting his M.A. he had taught at Berkeley for two years but was now between jobs, so he was taking a year off, hitchhiking across Europe, and reading great books in beautiful places. “You know, Proust in Paris, Dante in Florence, and Jane Austen in the English countryside. I suppose you think that sounds a bit pompous.”
    “I think it sounds wonderful,” said Sophie, who could think of no better way to spend a year. “But, if you’re hitchhiking, how