Voices

Inscriptions in old books have an eerie quality--those glimpses of forgotten lives and echoes of silenced voices. So it’s no wonder that the Internet found itself fascinated by a World War I-era copy of Pride and Prejudice with an overlay of tragedy.

Last November, a young woman posted an Instagram video featuring the first volume of a clothbound P&P. Flipping to the flyleaf, she reveals the inscription: “To Emmie with love from Eyre.” Underneath, in a different hand, someone has written “Christmas 1915”—and then the wrenching kicker: “Eyre was reported missing on the Battle of the Somme 1^st July 1916. Lt. Royal Irish Rifles.”

According to the Newsweek article that alerted me to this story, the poster was a twenty-six-year-old Brit named Meg who once worked in a bookshop. Her video has its cringey aspects—the lingering shot of Meg looking beautiful yet pensive, the accompanying cover of Abba’s “Slipping Through My Fingers”—but it’s hard to argue with her description of the book as an “amazing little piece of social history.” (Cue the likes—nearly 100,000 to date.)

And that enticing mystery! Who was Eyre? Who was Emmie? Was this a Mr. Darcy-Elizabeth Bennet romance cut short by war?

Well—no.

Unsurprisingly, solving this little puzzle in the age of Google is child’s play, and the online trail I followed turned out to duplicate similar journeys by more than one reader of Meg’s original post.

The Eyre of the inscription seems likely to have been nineteen-year-old Irishman Arthur Eyre Coote (scroll down to the tenth row), the only “Eyre” whose regiment, rank, and date and place of death match the information on the flyleaf. A photo of Coote in uniform, looking heartbreakingly young and serious, can be seen on the website of the UK’s Imperial War Museum.

The online genealogical site WikiTree shows that Coote, who was only five when his forty-nine-year-old father died, was the tenth of eleven siblings. And lo and behold—the fourth-oldest of those siblings, who was twenty-nine at Christmas of 1915, was a sister named Emilie. The Emmie of the inscription? Not certain, but I’d call it probable.

Did Pride and Prejudice have any special significance for Eyre, or for Emmie? Or did the book acquire its significance only in retrospect, as a reminder of the last Christmas of a boy lost to the appalling carnage of the Somme? Impossible to say. All those voices are silenced now.