Christmas in August (Being a Jane Austen Mystery)

As an antidote to the extreme heat of August and the unrelenting smoke of wildfires here in the western U.S., I have just reread Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas by Stephanie Barron and have a Christmas-y review for you, with no spoilers. It helped to beat the heat just to open the book and read the first few pages in which the Austen ladies are caught in a snowstorm.

Time: 24 Dec 1814 – 5 Jan 1815; Afterword, 2 March 1815
Place: Hampshire, England: traveling from Chawton to Steventon, thence to The Vyne, back to Steventon, to Ashe Park, to Sherbourne St John, back to Steventon, to the Vyne. Afterword at Chawton.

The Austen ladies (Mrs. George Austen, Cassandra, and Jane) at the opening of the novel are traveling from Chawton to Steventon for Christmas. After an accident and chance encounter with Raphael West, the son of the famous painter Benjamin West, they are invited with the Steventon family of James and Mary Austen and their children to stay at The Vyne, a great house 17 miles north, for the twelve days of Christmas. With Mary Austen (Mrs. James) presented as a model for hypochondriac Mary Musgrove of Persuasion, and with James Austen presented as so sanctimonious that he is almost Cromwellian in his suspicions of the pagan origins of Christmas traditions, their removal to The Vyne is a portal into cheerful festivity. The juxtaposition of pre-Victorian Christmas traditions, with their emphasis on communal merriment, against two murders and a third attempt with all the subsequent detective activity, provide the narrative structure.

But let us concentrate on the fun.

The Christmas festivities the Austen ladies look forward to include the burning of a Yule log (a giant oak log that burns slowly for days); decorating with greenery but not a tree; playing at Snap-dragon (snatching nuts and raisins out of a shallow bowl of burning brandy with one’s fingers, without getting burned); playing charades (not our modern version, but writing riddles that the other team tries to decipher correctly); observing the Festival of St. Stephen on the day after Christmas, when the servants are given the day off and the family shifts for themselves; and holding a Children’s Ball on Twelfth Night at which children are crowned King and Queen, adults are their servants, and most everyone assumes a comic character given out at the entrance (Jane Austen gives herself the role of Miss Candour). The twelve days of Christmas are counted from Christmas day until the 5th of January. In 1814 Christmas day was on a Sunday, so everyone went to church that morning. (I don’t know if there would be a Christmas morning service in other years when the day was not the same as the Sabbath.)

Jane and Cassandra Austen have created a series of gifts for their ten-year-old niece Caroline: a doll with changes of clothes for every occasion. They give her the doll on Christmas eve, in spite of their brother James’s disapproval, and in spite of acknowledging that it is more usual to wait until Twelfth Night to exchange gifts. They then give her a new outfit for the doll every morning of the Twelve Days of Christmas, and each change of costume is tied somehow to that day’s activities or discoveries. It is a good example of Stephanie Barron’s talent for structure and thematic development. The presentation of the gifts also functions as a lightening of the mood, except in one case in which the effect of the murders on the precocious ten-year-old is acknowledged by Jane Austen comforting the child when she finds her wakeful and frightened, and one other occasion when it functions as a means to resolve a minor plot twist.

In this tale, the only exchange of gifts described on Twelfth Night is a group exchange of the truth. And that may be the best gift Jane Austen can concoct for everyone involved.

Finally, this book is a gift to us Jane-as-sleuth fans. From what I read of Stephanie Barron’s plans for the series following Bantam’s refusal to publish any more books, I think that she had planned only one more for Jane, the one she was tentatively calling Jane and the Carlton House Set, which would become Jane and the Waterloo Map. I suspect that in negotiating the contract for that last book with Soho Crime, Ms. Barron gave us a Christmas treat in adding this book to the series before ending with a skewering of the icons of the Regency period.

Happy Christmas in August!

For my full comments on this novel, including spoilers, see my Jane Austen as Sleuth post.