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.