I breathed a sigh of relief. That had all been fairly clear and comprehensible. He had not even mentioned Lacan.

Although the Professor had already touched on the subject of the writer’s literary influences, I pressed him harder. Could he tell from the letter what kind of books she had read? I asked. He had clearly been considering the question. ‘My guess is that she has read a lot of nineteenth-century poetry by Hugo, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, possibly by Lamartine, and that she is well-read in the prose literature of the same period, often called poetic prose or prose poems. Those are two separate genres or sub-genres but tend to produce the same sort of writing: the interrelationship between human feeling and the movements of nature, and the combining of both – nature and feeling – within the syntax. Examples of that can be found all over the place in nineteenth-century French literary writing.’

I asked if he could see any direct plagiarization from other works. ‘No,’ he shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a matter of regret to me that I can’t, because I cannot help feeling that as a professional in the field of French literature I should have been able to track down various things. But what I do take from the letter is a general sense of the writer’s immersion in nineteenth-century French poetry and poetic prose. That is a language of exaltation and uplift, a language of emotional intensity, which in itself shelves away into another language that I know much less about, the language of religious consolation. My guess is that there are a number of tracts and pamphlets that talk about loss, pain, bereavement and consolation, and the importance of an afterlife, whether of a celestial or terrestrial kind. There are moments, whether of personal originality or just of a more cunning, more resourceful borrowing from other sources, where the language becomes markedly more intense. It leaves the popular prayer-book literature far behind, and evolves into something richer and stranger, a literature of supercharged expressiveness. I’d like to think, of course – one is always on the lookout for unacknowledged geniuses – that here is an ordinary person who has suddenly risen to new heights of expression and become a writer in her own right and for her own end.’ He paused, then shrugged. ‘But it could be that, if there is borrowing going on that this is just a more artful form of borrowing.’

Since the Professor had mentioned the literature of religious consolation, I asked him what he thought about the elements of New Age spirituality in the letter.

‘She’s got this from a whole international literature of New Age writing, much of it in French, much translated from Anglo-American into French. What causes me to hesitate somewhat about that as a major element in explaining this text is that New Ageism as I understand it tends to indulge in fantasy solutions of one kind or another; it tends to envelop things in spiritual happy-talk. But what this writer is doing instead is reintroducing the heavy tread of mortality into the sentences: “I had you, you were mine, you were close to me and you’ve gone, and there’s nothing I can do about it. And my writing in one sense can just keep on retelling the story of your loss, of your being lost.” So there’s something down-to-earth and dour and minimalist about the writing as well. This is what it feels like to be a bereaved mother, this is the inescapable absence that my life is permeated by. And that runs counter to the New Age optimism and rosy-huedness in very interesting ways.’