“Jubilee” was first published in Guernica on June 17, 2013. It was collected and is currently most readily available in Night at the Fiestas (W. W. Norton).

I more or less remember two things: first, a demanding, pitiless professor from my college years shaking his head in shocking bewilderment, wondering at how hard-hearted his beloved Jane Austen must have been to visit so much suffering upon her heroines. And two: my sister once remarking that a famous young male writer, who had been pronounced Great, wasn't mature enough to write great novels. My sister said he was too full of rage to write with dispassionate clarity. If some day he gained the distance on his characters that, say, Alice Munro or Willa Cather had, then maybe he could be called Great.

Rage is a staple fuel for a writer; it is plentiful, exhilarating, and cheap. The white carbs, the potatoes, fries, and donuts of the writer's emotional food group, what's required to climb the mountain. One of the beauties of rage is how it can be conjured in an instant; it is borne from the smallest injustice or hurt, and also it will flame up from gross violations to the body and spirit. Rage, in sum, is not special. But controlling the heat and the sprawl of it—that's another story.

I'm guessing that “Jubilee” could well have been written from a point of white-hot rage, and therefore been in danger of a hectoring, didactic tone, the ideas overwhelming the characters. However, Kirstin Valdez Quade isn't interested in writing directly about oppression or social justice; she doesn't seem to want to place blame, to stick it to the man. Rather, in “Jubilee” she wants to get at how social standing, income inequity, and race affect the inner life of one young woman. Although Quade is herself still a young writer, she is preternaturally mature. She understands that by precisely chronicling Andrea's distress, by mapping her inner landscape, the outer world then will be precisely revealed. As for a hard heart, I suspect that Quade is tender for all real-life intents and purposes, yet she spares her heroine no misery. Quade and Jane Austen both are master torturers in their work.