When I open an Austen novel, I feel pleased and expectant. But I realise that for Emma I’m now beginning another chapter with ‘uneasiness’. It must be a sort of tic that happily passes as I go on writing. Still, for the moment there it is. I revere Emma but something disturbs me about the heroine and her novel.

Anyone who fears she might be an interloper, the not-quite-proper arrival in a new place will understand my point. Mrs Elton dropped abruptly into Highbury: loud Mrs Elton, not quite ‘a lady’.

As a child I changed schools incessantly before landing at that Bastille of a boarding school. As an adult, I moved jobs and continents at a similar wild rate. So I suffered not once but repeatedly the transplanting Mrs Elton declared ‘one of the evils of matrimony’. I know what it is to be out of place, to get it wrong in language, gesture, opinion and intellectual notions. To overcome the awkward, inevitable deep-down shyness in school, academia or new town, what is there to do but try to assert yourself and jiggle the old regime to make it let you in. No chance of course, you’ll overegg the pudding. But it makes you feel – occasionally – a whole lot better, like a perky mouse fidgeting among complacent cats.