Which, in retrospect, probably meant that they were better qualified, but that only occurred to me once it was already too late to turn back.
I should have known something was wrong when my advisor’s parting words were Good luck. To his credit, he had — very gently — suggested that I might want to consider a different sort of topic. But I didn’t want to consider another topic. I was madly in love with my topic: “Aristocratic Espionage during the Wars with France, 1789- 1815.” It had dash, it had swash, it had buckle.
It also had no primary sources. My life would have been much easier had I followed my advisor’s suggestion and looked more closely into the careers of those men who spied for England under government auspices, and thus might reasonably be expected to show up in government dispatches and payrolls. That was far too easy. What I intended to unravel were the networks of independent adventurers, those daring souls who had struck out on their own for King and country, using their family connections and the benefit of independent income to create elaborate bouquets of flower-named spies: the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, the League of the Purple Gentian, and finally, the most intriguing of the them all, the League of the Pink Carnation.
You can see where this is going, can’t you? I had arrived in London in September. By November, my fingernails were all gone, chewed to the quick. I had no footnotes; I had no dissertation. I was stranded in a country where the sun sets at four and I was never ever going to get an academic job, much less a tenure-track one.