We dispensed, too, with plotlessness, meandering, female helplessness, travelogue, moral suasion, and certain types of villainy. Alas, ‘twas not to be obviously, it would have been illegible also, Jane hates that stuff. I love those thundering capitals, almost as much as the stuttering em-dashes and the racy italics and the antique lower case s that looks like a tipsy, naked f.
O, but eighteenth-century capitalization was not Random it was inspired. What aspects of the eighteenth-century novel did you dispense with, to make the book appeal to modern readers? Random capitalization? Last March, you wrote in the magazine about the concurrent rise of the novel and the history as literary forms.
And then I’d have to plot my next steps, which usually amounted to something about as artful as tripping over the dog in the course of moving the knife to, dunno, the kitchen, while spending most of my pages trying to find a way for poor besotted Jameson to steal a kiss. “What am I meant to do with the knife on the hall table?” I’d wonder. Its arrival ever left me equal parts awed and stumped. I’d write one of Jameson’s chapters, e-mail it to Jane, and wait, frantic with impatience, for Fanny’s next letter to show up in my inbox. We wrote by turns, in weekly installments, the way people used to read serial fiction. The dog, however, is mine alone, my actual dog, and I dare not foreswear him, even if he lacks for couth. But then we edited each other and edited the whole thing together and, in the end, it’s his, hers, and ours.
So, yes: I wrote Stewart Jameson’s picaresque Jane wrote Fanny Easton’s epistolary. Not to mention, I really am a witless, blustering Scotsman who curses like a sailor and drinks like a fish. Otherwise, the novel would have been a mish-mash. There are two of us we have very different voices there had to be two narrators. Did one of you write Easton’s voice and the other Jameson’s? In eighteenth-century fashion, the novel-subtitled “By a Lady in Disguise & A Gentleman in Exile”-is chiefly comprised of letters and entries written by the two main protagonists, Fanny Easton and Stewart Jameson.
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