Novel Readings

When I posted about the new term back in September, I closed by saying that I anticipated “some coming changes that I will also want to write about, when the time is right.” I think it’s time now, because now it’s finally settled: I will be retiring at the end of this academic year, which means that next term, Winter 2027, will be my last teaching term at Dalhousie.

It was a very difficult decision to make, one that preoccupied me for much of the summer. Local people will know that King’s (where I am technically employed, though I do all my work at Dalhousie–it’s complicated, nobody really understands!) is in some financial difficulty, a situation that is common for Canadian higher ed institutions at this point but perhaps particularly tricky for a small rather niche place like King’s to address. As part of the college’s efforts to retrench (a word I will never hear without thinking of Sir Walter Elliot!) they put together an early retirement package and gave eligible faculty and staff to the end of August to apply for it. Without that offer, I would probably not have thought to retire quite so early, but I knew I wouldn’t have persisted for many more years, so the question boiled down to “if soon anyway, then why not now?” This doesn’t mean that it was simple to answer! But the things that made it complicated–the things that are going to be very hard when this year is up–are always going to be difficult for me. At some point, I’m just going to have to face them, work through them, and see what lies beyond. There’s something to be said for doing that before I get much older.

So I submitted my application at the end of August; last week it was approved by King’s, and I signed off officially on the plan on Friday. When I’m done, at the end of June 2027, I will be 60 and will have been doing this job for 32 years. I had the great good fortune to get the offer before I had even completed my Ph.D., which I was happily able to wrap up expeditiously at that point. It is fair to say, then, that this job has defined my adult life–for better and for worse. The prospect of not doing it anymore is disorienting: I have feelings about it! Be warned that some of those feelings will no doubt show themselves in my posts this year, especially my posts about my classes. It is just so strange and sad to think of the things I won’t do again, like lead discussions of The Moonstone (why is it that The Moonstone is the novel I feel the most regret–at the moment, anyway–about never teaching again? I think it’s that I have always had so much fun with it) or introduce students to the delights of David Copperfield or surprise first-year students into enjoying poetry. (OK, that last one probably reflects some wishful thinking on my part, but maybe it did sometimes happen?) I might have put in for different classes this year if I’d known they would be my last ones, but on the bright side, I did assign Middlemarch for the 19th-century fiction class. I’m really glad about that.

Feelings, so many feelings. So much has happened in the rest of my life while I kept on going to work; sometimes going to work, and especially being in the classroom, was the one thing that kept me going. The scariest thought for me now is: can I really do without it? How often have I written here about my summer slumps, for instance? How many times did I experience the therapeutic benefits of having to get outside my own head for a while and be fully in the moment? Where else will I find the same sense of purpose, the same satisfaction of a job well done, the same rewards that you get from knowing you have helped or inspired a student, working with them on ideas and enthusiasms and skills they will carry forward with them into the life they are making?

I know, I know: there are other ways, other roles, other opportunities. I have heard all the advice about having something to “retire to” and I get it, and I have ideas, although it seems a bit much to be expected to have that future all figured out now, while I am still working full time at my regular gig! I also know there are plenty of things about work that I won’t miss, from tedious administrative duties to the worsening crisis that AI has created for the kind of teaching and learning my career has been dedicated to. It has not been a good few years in higher ed–it’s been a bad couple of decades, really, but recently the imperative to “do more with less” has gotten us to what feels like a tipping point, such that it is getting increasingly difficult to do anything at all. And yet, and yet.

I know too that a professorial career like the one I have had–already elusive when I was hired here in the mid 1990s (something we had some personal experience with, as my ex-husband had a much longer road to his tenure-track position)–has become a kind of mirage, something that far too many brilliant and exceptionally qualified people will never have, in this era of exploitation and precarity. It should not be this way. It’s not that senior people who don’t retire are the problem, either: most of my colleagues who have already retired have just never been replaced. The Dalhousie Calendar is full of courses we will never put on again. I think probably “my” classes will be taught again–though possibly only on an ad hoc basis by folks on part-time contracts. I suppose it’s also possible that the department will be able to add up all the recent departures to finally make a successful case for at least one new full-time position, but would 19th-century fiction be a priority? It’s easy to make fun of job ads that seem like shopping lists, but if you get to hire only one person where you once had three or four or five, how do you make the most of the opportunity?

Anyway, this is going to be a year of reflections for me; an elegiac tone seems inevitable! I am actually curious to look back through my teaching posts, which cover almost twenty years now, and see what patterns and shifts and insights emerge: endings always give shape and meaning to what has come before. I am not done yet, though! This week and next we are working through North and South, and then we start Middlemarch and I am going to really “giv’er” this time. After that comes Jude the Obscure; it’s good I still have next term to go after that, since that would be a real downer of a conclusion. Part of my retirement negotiation was for a lighter load next term, so I’ll have just one more class to go after Christmas, which will be my Honours seminar on women and detective fiction. It’s not necessarily what I would have chosen as my swan song, but one of our texts will be Gaudy Night, one of my personal top ten novels, and I expect that its inquiry into the values and compromises of the academic life will be particularly resonant as my own experiment with that draws to its end.