Augustus Harley

Dear Emma Courtney,

I don't want your letters.

These parchment rats infest my house, carrying the plague of your delusional profession of love. One after another, they multiply regardless of whatever I do. Should I respond to you in a single line, you send off another one, insisting I explain myself when I have already done so quite economically. Should I choose to ignore the letter, another one arrives nearly twice its size, demanding why I have not responded. I have never been one to take pleasure in reading the myths of ancient Greece, but I must confess I feel as if I am battling the Lernaean Hydra, for it seems this intercourse between me and you will never cease, until I am left faced with a hundred of your immortal leering serpentine letters that will not hesitate the strip the flesh from my bones and deliver them to you.

Your absurd logic amuses and irritates me dearly, for I confess I have never met someone as full of inflated confidence in the matters of romance as you. You attempt to rationalize the utterly irrational concept of love and come to the conclusion that the fact that I do not reciprocate your ardor must mean that I hold a prior engagement with another, and that whoever she is clearly cannot love me as much as you do. Apparently, it has yet to cross your mind that perhaps I simply do not find you attractive at all.

I must thank you, however, for providing me with a new, fashionable method of entertaining guests that my wife and I wait on from time to time. I have collected all of your letters -- each and every one of them -- in a wicker basket from which we take turns drawing a letter out and picking out the most delightfully nonsensical sentences we can find. With the massive quantity of letters you have sent me over the months, I am gleefully certain that we shall not be deficient of merriment and laughter for quite some time.

Disregard the first sentence of my letter. I assure you, I (and my social acquaintances) can hardly wait to hear from you again.

Yours,
Augustus Harley

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One of the books I've read for my Jane Austen class is titled The Memoirs of Emma Courtney by Mary Hays. I must confess that I did not enjoy that novel nearly as much as my classmates, for I was dying to knock some sense into the self-absorbed girl all throughout the second half of the book. Yes, I am well aware of the parallels between Emma Courtney's letters and the former incarnation of my own blog. However, I would like to believe I was not nearly as self-delusional as this girl.

//SPOILER ALERT//

I sympathized with Augustus Harley until the sickeningly melodramatic moment at the end of the book when he confesses before he kicks the bucket that he has always loved Emma Courtney. Hence, I would like to pretend that that incident never happened, and that instead Augustus Harley sent off an acerbic letter to Emma Courtney written quite in the style of the one I have written on his behalf.