Ms. Barron’s attention to style, syntax, vocabulary and usage, and overall intelligence and wit in creating the character is spot on. It feels like reading about the real Jane Austen, mostly. Obviously the anachronism is the murder mystery, which admittedly can be a big distraction to maintaining the tone, but it does not overwhelm and throw the reader firmly back into reality. As a reader you feel you are in Austen’s world.
I’ve just reread the first three books this week and was struck again by how very good they are. Stephanie Barron has not fallen into any of the obvious mistakes other authors use with Jane Austen that I can perceive, beyond that of making Jane a sleuth, a conceit which, once one has suspended disbelief, and if one is a confirmed murder mystery addict as I am, is perfectly fun.
It helps that Ms Barron is superb about constructing murder mystery plots, employing red herrings to terrific effect, and being creative about the use of Austen-typical genre elements so that the element of surprise is consistent.
If you haven’t read the books and don’t want to read spoilers, stop here and go read the books. You will enjoy yourself, I promise!
I found it interesting in the first mystery, The Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, that although I knew the name and character of Lord Harold Trowbridge very well, his function as a major red herring in that book remained partly intact, as I did not remember over the twenty years between readings exactly what role he played in the solution. I had forgotten completely who was the murderer and only figured it out in the latter half, even knowing Lord Harold was not in the running, which I think is a testament to the author’s skill at hiding clues. (I refuse, of course, to entertain the idea that I’m stupid about these things!)
Lord Harold’s involvement in the second book, Jane and the Man of the Cloth, was not necessary, of course, to the intrinsic story in that book, appearing on the beach at the very end as he does, but he has to be there because of the later books. The story arc that spans seven or eight of the books demands the presence of Lord Harold, as he turns out to be the tragic love of Jane’s life. One thing wrong with that other author’s Jane-Austen-romance was that it ended pathetically with a parting that had nothing of noble tragedy in it. Barron quite correctly gives Jane a high tragedy, almost Shakespearean. But in the second book there is no romance between the two. Instead, their relationship is forwarded by Lord Harold’s observation that Jane’s sleuthing skills are formidable enough that he jokes she will be right behind him in the next case and he’ll have to hire her. She retorts that he will more likely trip over her foot not looking for her to be in front of him. It’s a witty enough exchange, with just a whiff of feminist ideology, not enough to form an anachronism, but enough for piquancy.
The third mystery, Jane and the Wandering Eye, is much more complicated than the first two, and it is a terrific story.
The painter Thomas Lawrence, notorious for his affairs, in this book dallies with an actress named Maria Conyngham (a fictional character; not the real Maria Conyngham whom Lawrence painted in the 1820s—and here I’ll stop remarking on what is actual history and what isn’t, and who is fictional and who is real but acting fictionally).
In this story Maria Conyngham, with her actor brother Hugh, was brought up in the family of the famous actress Sarah Siddons. Sarah’s daughters Maria and Sally were both in love with Lawrence, and he dallied with each at different times. Maria was a fiery character, and Lawrence painted her eye portrait (literally, a small portrait of one eye only, a fashionable object in those days) and gave it to her mother when Maria died of consumption at the age of 18. Sally died of consumption not very long later, about a year before the action of the book.
So, when the novel opens at a fancy-dress Christmas party held in the Dowager Duchess of Wilborough’s Bath residence at Laura Place, at which Jane Austen and her brother Henry and sister-in-law Eliza are present, the actor Hugh Conyngham provides an entertainment of one of MacBeth’s speeches. During the speech, a murder happens in the room behind, and the doors are thrown open to reveal the Dowager Duchess’s grandson, Simon, Lord Kinsfell, standing with a bloody knife over the corpse of the theater manager, Richard Portal. Maria Conyngham stages a grief-stricken scene over the body, and Jane notes everything, except what she hadn’t seen, which was that Kinny took the eye portrait, which had been lying on top of the body when he discovered it, and secreted it in his waistcoat. He thinks it might have been of his sister, Desdemona.
When Lord Harold Trowbridge, son of the Dowager Duchess, shows up and asks Jane to help him solve the crime and clear his nephew, of course she agrees, much to the growing consternation of her family, who cannot understand and cannot be told exactly why Jane is so much in the company of this man. Jane had actually been acting for him anyway, keeping an eye on his niece, Desdemona, who had fled London to avoid an unwelcome suitor, the Earl of Swithin.
Swithin provides a great red herring by playing the role of villainous suitor, but you realize pretty quickly that the lady doth protest too much and actually likes him, and in the end he turns out to have saved his family’s reputation and fortune and thus provides a good plot twist at an important point.
Swithin’s chief rival for Desdemona is Colonel Easton, a military man who has nothing military to do at the moment, so he pursues Desdemona to rile up Swithin, whom he had thought was attracted to Maria Conyngham, so they had had a duel and Swithin wounded Easton in the right arm. Easton goes about wearing a sling for most of the book, but at the end Lord Harold forces him to reveal that his right arm is just fine, thanks, and that he has been shamming. In fact, he was the murderer.
The victim was supposed to have been the painter, Lawrence, and the main motive for Easton, jealousy over Maria Conyngham (she was having an affair with Easton as well as having had an affair with Lawrence). Maria Conyngham and her brother Hugh were both in on the plot for their own revenge; Maria because Lawrence ended their affair when he heard about Sally Siddons’s death, and Hugh because he had been in love with Maria Siddons and Lawrence had taken her away from him. Maria C wrote a note to Lawrence to tell him to meet her in the anteroom at the exact time that Hugh was speaking his MacBeth lines. Easton was supposed to appear at that point and kill Lawrence.
The problem was that the ball was fancy dress, and both Lawrence and Richard Portal were dressed in Harlequin costumes, Lawrence in red and black diamonds, and Portal in white and black. Portal had got into the anteroom first by accident, and Maria, seeing him there, left, just at the moment Lawrence entered the room and saw both Portal on the sofa asleep and Maria leaving through the secret passageway. He assumed Maria no longer wanted to talk to him and left too. And when Easton arrived immediately after, he didn’t realize there were two Harlequin costumes and killed the man in the room.
Easton tried to implicate his enemy Swithin, whose family’s device of a snarling tiger on a brooch Easton had obtained and dropped in the passageway between rooms, and whose wounding of him had been the final straw in his dislike.
The author uses symbolism to good effect in the book, especially in the scene where Jane and Lord Harold walk into the Labyrinth in Sydney Gardens. That Jane knows the way yet allows Lord Harold to take the lead is interesting, and when they take a wrong turn, Jane knows how to direct them going the right way again. But she allows Lord Harold to get them to the heart of the Labyrinth after all. And that is where the author ends that scene, with them needing to get out again. This goes well beyond this book to the multiple book story arc. It prefigures what will happen to the pair next.
Eyes, and the ability to see or not, and disguises are motifs that come up frequently, particularly with reference to people’s feelings. The “stormy” eye portrait starts the issue, but the fact of most people at the initial party wearing eye masks as part of their costumes is used to good effect when it is Desdemona of all the party goers who wears no mask and yet is masking her true feelings through much of the story. Jane’s ability to “read” Lord Harold increases throughout the novel, even when he tries to keep his expression unreadable. That very attempt at blankness is transparent to Jane’s eyes by the end. She knows the ubiquitous Maria Conyngham has managed to hurt him in spite of his earlier assurances that he cannot be affected.
Speaking of Maria Conyngham, as Lord Harold says to Jane: “It is a dreadful presumption to serve in judgement on one’s fellow men. It is to play a little at God—and though I have been accused of such a score of times before, I only now admit to approaching it.”
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UPDATES:
As I have read each book in the series, I have added it here. These reviews are intended to be read only by people who have finished reading the books, unless you are willing to learn all the solutions now!
Jane and the Genius of the Place
In the fourth mystery, Jane and the Genius of the Place, Stephanie Barron has written a novel of manners interspersed with episodes of murder mystery and detection efforts. The book has a lot to say about how to behave in polite society, with Françoise Grey, the murder victim, exhibiting outrageous behavior at the Canterbury Race meeting, to the entertainment of the party of Austen ladies. They discuss her behavior inside and out through the rest of the novel, with plenty of commentary on propriety and the lack thereof, and what it might mean about her life, and the implications for the younger Austens.
That opening scene constitutes all the clues the reader gets until more than halfway through the book. If the reader did not pick up on the clues at the outset, put them together with the title, and come up with the identity of the murderer (but not the name) right then, well, the reader would be out of luck until chapter 11, when the culprit reappears and is given a name at last, but he’s been away so long you probably have forgotten all about him and don’t connect him with the mysterious man at that opening scene.
The murder mystery is a tricky problem, the solution involving the Napoleonic wars, the money financing the war and specifically the proposed invasion of England, as well as gambling, blackmail, and the role of gossip in wartime in an area likely to be invaded by the enemy. This allows the author to unfold a few twists at the end, just to keep the inattentive reader guessing who actually did the foul murder.
But I have a few complaints to make about this entry in the series, as I think these problems make this story unnecessarily weak.
How thick was that veil? How could Henry Austen discern the color of the eyes of the wearer of the veil, and yet not realize it wasn’t a lady wearing it? How closely did the murderer resemble his victim? She was supposed to be beautiful. Very few men in a wig without makeup would be beautiful like a woman. Think of the pictures you’ve seen of Jackie Kennedy at the funeral of the late President. That’s what a beautiful woman looks like wearing a black veil. You could see her features pretty clearly. And this veil that the murderer wore was described as black illusion net, which makes seeing the features, even eye color, possible. Had it been a thicker kind to disguise his features, nobody could have see the eye color.
How could he have passed his form off as that of a shapely woman? Simply donning her riding habit over his own clothes does not change his shape to hers, and he was described as slender. He should have had to wear some padding to make the disguise effective. And a thicker veil.
After the race, he returns to Mrs Grey’s phaeton, which is nearly next to the Austens’ barouche, and they watch all the action, yet none of them realize this not Mrs Grey. In a Shakespeare play where you suspend disbelief for all the conventions of men and women disguising themselves as one another, this all works. But here it does not. Not for me.
Having the governess recognize his riding posture from a long distance when he was only a spot of red color seemed a reach, especially when later he was next to them, dismounting and climbing into Mrs Grey’s phaeton and driving away. That’s when the author should have had the governess recognize his disguise. And then she should have made a noise and fainted, or something. And then he could have murdered her next to keep her quiet. No, we can’t have that, because the historical Anne Sharpe wasn’t a murder victim. At the very least, she should have been looking carefully at him to make sure that her long-distance recognition was true. Maybe she did that; we don’t get a lot of information about her actions at this point, we only know that she faints when the dead body spills out of Collingforth’s carriage.
I’m not sure I believe the characterization of the governess, Anne Sharpe. It doesn’t seem consistent. Because Anne Sharpe had felt all the force of an intimate betrayal by Julian Sothey at the point when Mrs Grey hit him with her whip before the race, I’d have expected her to be unable to continue to attend to the needs of Fanny Austen just minutes later, as if nothing had happened. Anne Sharpe seems to have extraordinary strength of mind in her ability to act, based on the next few pieces of information about her. But when the race begins and the governess recognizes Sothey in disguise as Mrs Grey, she begins to go to pieces. Why should she, if she was able to exercise such self-command at the point of the betrayal? She doesn’t know yet that he’s done anything but have a relationship with Mrs Grey. His wearing the riding habit and riding her horse would be a puzzle, but not a further shock. Having Anne faint when the dead body of Mrs Grey appears is fitting, as then the shock of murder is added in her mind to the betrayal. But a few minutes later than this, she is back to behaving with extraordinary self-control, suggesting to Fanny that they read riddles together while waiting for the gentlemen to process the murder scene. Then she again goes to pieces, pleading headache and illness. Through the rest of the novel, she behaves as a weak sort of woman, under considerable strain and not holding up well. Jane is forever suggesting she rest more, until Anne Sharpe’s behavior finally suggests suspicion to Jane’s mind.
The history of the romance between Anne Sharpe and Julian Sothey would have been better had the author not introduced that scene at the end when he bursts upon them near the front door of the house at 2 a.m., and exclaims, “You see before you, Anne, a heart now more your own than when you nearly broke it a few days ago!” Really? I can barely forgive author Stephanie Barron for stealing and adapting this line from Jane Austen’s Persuasion character Captain Frederick Wentworth, whose use was both heartfelt and accurate, since the time period he and his beloved had been parted was more than eight years, and thus there was logic to acknowledging the strengthening of his feeling despite his initial heartbreak, whereas Sothey neither suffers heartbreak nor endures pain for any significant length of time. It’s farcical, and I hate the imputation that such a bitterly laughable scene led to such an elevated scene in Jane Austen’s mind.
Jane Austen as sleuth suffers from lack of insight in this story. She sees right through Emilius Finch-Hatton (she does not believe his assertion that he and Lord Harold Trowbridge are intimate friends, though they are obviously acquainted), but she completely believes everything Julian Sothey says. This is not like our Jane. But perhaps we have to give her some latitude. Finch-Hatton betrayed himself with an incongruous statement right off. Sothey was a superb actor and we can allow Jane to be human enough not to be able to see through everybody.
I was disappointed through much of the novel that we were not to see and enjoy the company of Lord Harold Trowbridge. But he appears at the very end, climbing the hill to the little temple where Jane has been writing. Jane had gone to Goodnestone Farm at the close of the climactic scene where all was revealed, and she is back at Godmersham after a week. Jane writes that she has refused the expected proposal from Edward Bridges, as did Cassandra before her, and thus we assume that like Cassandra, Jane had to leave Goodnestone as soon as that proposal was refused. Anyway, Lord Harold comes. He and Jane exchange two speeches and walk off arm in arm.
Not totally satisfying, but it will have to do until the next book.
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“Jane and the Spoils of Stoneleigh”
Time: 6 Aug 1806
Place: Stoneleigh Abbey, Warwickshire
In a brilliant short story that extols the virtue of not neglecting Gothic novels in one’s reading of Great Literature, Stephanie Barron has her sleuth prove that the solution to a dusty old murder starts with great familiarity with Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, progresses to Cowper’s poetry and ends in an adaptation of Shakespeare, specifically Julius Caesar.
The solution means that historical figures have to be turned into murderers. Historical facts are that Jane Austen’s mother was a Leigh, and her first cousin Thomas Leigh aspired to inherit Stoneleigh Abbey under the complex terms of the will of the 5th Baron Leigh (of the first creation), Edward, who died in 1786 after having been declared insane in 1774 and consigned to the guardianship of his uncle and his sister. Twenty years later, in 1806, when Edward’s sister Mary died, various members of the Leigh family came out of the woodwork to claim the Abbey, Mad Baron Edward having died childless. Besides Thomas Leigh, another cousin named James-Henry Leigh also had a claim, he having descended from an older brother than Thomas Leigh. But Mad Edward’s will used the phrase “first and nearest” which Thomas interpreted to mean the eldest male living, himself, rather than following strict male primogeniture. So Thomas got the Abbey during his life, but James-Henry got both the Abbey and later a title as 1st Baron Leigh (of the second creation).
Is that complex enough for you? Author Barron uses these facts to construct a gothic tale well worthy of Jane Austen.
This story makes mad Edward a reputed murderer of his fiancée, Lucinda Carmichael, in 1774. This act led to his being declared insane and put under the guardianship of his sister, Mary. However, by decoding the quotes from the works of Radcliffe, Cowper, and Shakespeare, Jane and the family party discover that it was Mary who strangled Lucinda and put her body in the snow on the riverbank and sent her sensitive brother to find her. Mary wanted the Abbey for herself and decided that no heir after her would be able to claim it without the original Elizabethan-era deeds (the “Spoils of Stoneleigh”), so she created a treasure hunt with literary clues and her own diary confession hidden in a secret compartment in her tomb.
Excellent madness and horror in this tale would surely have pleased the “Fright for Fun” crowd of Jane Austen’s day.
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Jane and the Stillroom Maid
In her fifth novel, Jane and the Stillroom Maid, Jane Austen solves a wide-open bloodbath in the crags of Derbyshire, unlike the locked-room variations of her first, third, and fourth novels. Spoilers ahead, so beware!
Tess, the eponymous stillroom maid, has a penchant for learning secrets along with dispensing her medicines. She knows that Andrew Danforth wants his brother’s lands and position; she helps by murdering Charles Danforth’s three children and his wife and has begun to poison Charles himself with arsenic. She thinks Andrew will marry her and she will be the lady of the manor. She also has had ambitions of becoming a surgeon and had roped the local blacksmith-surgeon, Michael Tivey, into helping her by allowing her to share in his nocturnal anatomisations (autopsies) of recently-dead corpses. She’s used to wandering around in men’s clothing, as that way she can more safely meet Tivey wherever necessary. It helps her in her secret meetings with Andrew as well.
But Andrew realizes that she’s become a liability, and since he wants to marry the Duke of Devonshire’s daughter, Lady Harriet Cavendish, he summons Tess to meet him in the crags above Miller’s Dale, and there he lies in wait, and he shoots her when she arrives. Michael Tivey finds her body and cuts it up in a semi-ritualistic way to throw the blame on the Masons who have rejected his application to join.
The next day Jane Austen comes across the body while her cousin the Rev. Edward Cooper (who has brought Jane, her sister and her mother to Bakewell in Derbyshire) and his friend George Hemming are fishing, and she is taking a walk to pass the time.
The only fish running in this tale are the red herrings! Lots of people are suspected of parts of the crime, and the crime turns out to be a series of crimes, committed by several people. It’s a properly convoluted and satisfyingly surprising tale as it unfolds.
Solicitor George Hemming confesses to the crime to keep the Danforths (his clients) from suspicion, but they are suspected anyway. George Hemming, it turns out, is Andrew’s natural father, so Andrew, who was supposed to be Charles’s younger half brother by a second wife, is not blood kin to Charles after all and couldn’t inherit if it were known.
Charles, weighed down with grief for his children and wife, is so silent and morose as to make the common people think that he is the guilty party. He has no alibi for the time of Tess’s murder, and he is suspected of having done away with his children and wife himself so that he could inherit her fortune and be eligible to court and marry Lady Harriet Cavendish. Michael Tivey incites a mob to lynch him, and Charles is narrowly saved by Jane and Lord Harold Trowbridge, along with members of the Cavendish party from Chatsworth. But later, Charles confesses to killing Tess to save Andrew, whom he believes killed Tess in revenge for her killing his family. In the end, Andrew shoots Charles at the site where Tess was killed.
Over at Chatsworth, Jane meets Lady Harriet Cavendish’s younger brother, Lord Hartington, the heir to the Dukedom, a volatile-tempered boy of fifteen who suffers from partial deafness and is surly to all. He hates Tess. Since Hart rides around at all hours and is suffering greatly from grief over his mother’s death, he is a suspect, if not of the gunshot, then of the mutilation. It turns out that Tess had been dosing him to cure his deafness, and of course there was no change, and Hart discovered after a few months that Tess was selling all sorts of things to someone who dosed his mother before her death. Did his mother die from Tess’s potions?
Lady Elizabeth Foster, the late Duchess of Devonshire’s best friend (and the Duke’s mistress), has been buying potions from Tess for all sorts of problems, and all the potions seem to contain increasing amounts of morphia. Did she help the death of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire? Hart thinks so, and it is strongly hinted that this lady is ruthlessly ambitious to take over the late Duchess’s place at Chatsworth, even to the point of publicly usurping Lady Harriet’s place in the usual order of precedence in the household. Did she somehow do away with Tess as well, as Tess was by then well known for blackmail?
Meanwhile, a strong thread running through this novel is that of the gradual descent of Jane Austen into despair. She tips gently over the precipice from friendship into unrequited love for Lord Harold Trowbridge in the course of the novel, never admitting it outright but employing the contrast between her happiness at being with him as they cover the ground of the crimes for several hours one day, and her heartbreak in the closing scene as Jane enters the carriage to be borne away from him. Her devastation is skillfully and subtly expressed: “But it was a considerable period before I could utter a word, or appear sensible to my mother’s cries of delight as the carriage slipped south with the autumn leaves; and of Mr. Cooper’s voice lifted fulsomely in hymns of praise, I heard not a syllable. The image of a silver head and a whipcord form—of one last, serious parting look—were all that filled my sight.” The symbol of the autumn leaves is the dying of her hopes, and the idea of her being struck nearly deaf and dumb is poignant in the extreme.
But because this is a series, and because Lord Harold Trowbridge has so far been in every novel, we readers have not lost hope. He must appear again. Add to that, that he has traveled into his own heartbreak in this novel, and add still further that he has allowed Jane to know not only that he had been in love with Lady Harriet Cavendish himself, but that he had realized that he was simply substituting Lady Harriet for his real loss, that of Georgiana herself, over whom he had despaired many years before. That he takes Jane so far into his confidence, and that he and Jane undergo parallel journeys on this theme gives us further reason to hope. Lord Harold is going to be free to see Jane more clearly. It is a bittersweet hope, of course, knowing as we do that Jane never married. But we still want her to have her true romance, and this novel, with its nadir at the end, must be the clearing of a path leading upward.
I loved this novel. I think it was one of the very best of the series.
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Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House
In the sixth novel, Jane and her mother are living with Jane’s brother Frank and his wife Mary in Southampton, and their friend, Martha Lloyd, joins the household. Jane’s sister, Cassandra, is away visiting Godmersham. This is a tale of seamen, and it takes as an important theme what Jane would write in Persuasion as Anne Elliot attempts to cheer up the bereaved Captain James Benwick: he must rally, he must not give in to morbid thoughts; he must not read too much poetry but must include a dose of rational prose in his literary diet. In this murder mystery, these are the sorts of things the character Jane Austen wishes for the wife of the accused seaman, Louisa Seagrave, who seems to be giving in to morbid thoughts and a weak mind; Jane wishes as well that Louisa would stop taking laudanum, to which she is becoming definitely addicted. That this is a brilliant red herring adds to the delight of this tale.
The other Persuasion theme is that of how great seamen and the sea are. In this novel Jane takes the opinions expressed by Louisa Musgrave in Persuasion as her own. She rhapsodizes upon being in a boat on the water, never mind that she’s wet and freezing. But it is a powerful theme, as it underscores the innocence of the accused friend of Frank Austen.
I cannot fully admire the complex solution to the mystery, although I very much enjoyed this adventure with Jane and her family and new friends.
What happened is that Tom Seagrave, ironically called “Lucky Tom,” had the bad judgment to have eloped with a viscount’s daughter (Louisa), and years and years later when the viscount makes his will, the viscount’s greedy sister-in-law finds to her scheming delight that Louisa’s eldest boy could inherit all those lovely millions and Lady Templeton and her husband be assigned as trustees, IF Louisa’s husband were conveniently to die before the reading of the will, and then IF Louisa were to die of an overdose of opium . . . Meanwhile, Louisa has found her diminished social and economic condition is so galling as to kill her love for her husband, so she plays into her aunt’s scheme, thinking she is the one who will inherit everything if she can manage to make her husband hang for murder.
The murky part of the plot, that I didn’t understand, is how they managed to be able to arrange things: (1) the secret orders for Tom Seagrave to sail to a place in Portugal to pick up a Frenchman spying for the English (they bribed Sir Francis Farnham, a high-up in the Navy); (2) for the French ship Manon to pick up the spy first (who in France could they bribe?); (3) when the two ships meet and fight, the women’s double agent on Tom Seagrave’s ship, Lt. Chessyre, stabs the French captain and then lies and says Tom Seagrave murdered the captain. Then they kill Lt. Chessyre.
Lady Templeton’s plot hinges upon the timing of loosely connected events that seemed pretty improbable to me: the Viscount had to be known to be dying before Lady Templeton could bribe Sir Francis F to send Tom Seagrave on his voyage to Portugal. The French ship had to be successful in picking up the spy before Tom got there so that they would fight. Then the Viscount couldn’t die until Tom got back and was accused of murder, which took weeks. But then he had to die before Tom could be convicted and hung for the crime. Then Tom had to be convicted and hung before the will could be read a few days to a week after the Viscount’s death, which of course didn’t happen because the French spy-wildcard turned up. According to the scheme, as soon as Tom was dead, Louisa then had to die of an overdose of laudanum without suspecting Lady Templeton’s motives in giving her more. The timing is so tight and the variables so loose that I can’t believe in it. And I still don’t know how they arranged to have the French ship pick up the spy first.
The wild card in the unraveling of events is that the French spy shoots and kills the French captain, the only person who knows his identity. Chessyre takes the sword and stabs the captain after death, not knowing he was shot. The French spy, who is the eponymous prisoner of Wool House, gives Jane and Frank and Mr Hill, the surgeon Jane helps to nurse the French prisoners, this key to the mystery.
I did like how the detection fared, and I liked the way Jane related to her family, the family of the accused, and to the French prisoners held in Wool House, especially the French surgeon. However, her ironical wit seems to be suffering from absence.
Speaking of absence, Lord Harold Trowbridge has nothing at all to do with the story, except to rate a mention now and then by Jane’s mother in verbal jabs at his failure to ask for Jane’s hand, and by Jane, who thinks of him with regret, but who exercises her own advice on not giving in to depressing thoughts.
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Jane and the Ghosts of Netley
Here in Jane Austen’s seventh novel-length adventure, the love story arc stretching from the first book finds its tragic climax, but along the way, Jane Austen regains her wit. Readers all know that there is no hope that this romance can end happily, but we have had hope that there would be happiness along the way. Stephanie Barron has provided us with a tale that walks along a tense line dividing happiness and grief.
I’m not sure how to take the abrupt, close to shocking proposal scene early in the novel when Lord Harold takes Jane out in his closed carriage for a conference on strategy and yet acknowledges what Jane’s mother has broadly hinted, that his actions have compromised Jane’s reputation and that in shallow society’s eyes, he “owes” her a proposal of marriage. Jane herself is distressed by his bluntness and the absence of any hint of love in the exchange. It is the same thing she has rejected twice over: the business of trading herself to satisfy societal expectations. She turns aside the proposal with a bitter joke and they land in a surprising discussion of her writing. Thus the mock proposal turns into the first time when Jane finally shares with him what is truly important to her, who and what she is at the core. The entire scene is full of tension in that we readers are pretty sure they both wish for the romance, but Lord Harold still holds back, and Jane, true to her character, will not be the one to take the initiative, lest she be proven a fool.
Jane cannot wholly believe that Lord Harold means herself when, less than halfway through the book, he says to her, “My dear Jane . . . if you have not understood, by this time, that I love but one woman in the world—then we have nothing further to say”—which should have been clear, but it is not clear because Lord Harold has a fatal flaw of not actually being able to judge people clearly. No greater example is there than his flawed judgment of women, as Jane well knows. He falls prey to pretty and scheming women time and again, as he admits to Jane in this novel. She knows he prefers physical beauty, and she is no beauty. She knows the world he belongs to values money, class, position, power; all the things she lacks.
Apparently he has at last figured out that Jane’s intrinsic worth is more than all the world’s values, but even so, we and Jane are tormented right to the end with waiting for a direct declaration that both gives and asks for a commitment. That fatal flaw in his character cannot accept that for all her actual superiority to himself, Harold should work to deserve Jane as a wife. It is too late when he admits to how much he feels for Jane, and he realizes he should have married her before it was too late—but it is everlastingly too late.
The mystery in this novel becomes clear at the inquest into the death of the little maid that Lord Harold’s valet, Orlando, is the duplicitous culprit, and this is a second blatant instance of Lord Harold being unable to judge character rightly. He thinks because he saved Orlando’s life, Orlando is loyal to him. Because Lord Harold doesn’t believe Orlando is guilty yet, unwary readers are thrown off and may still think one of the twin brothers named da Silva is responsible. Orlando is in the pay of the French, spying and reporting, and Sophia Challoner knows it. Orlando set fire to the Itchen shipyard and slit the throat of Mr Dixon, the ship builder. He knocked down Jane and attacked Jeb Hawkins, the Bo'sun’s Mate, and stole his boat when Jeb and Jane discovered him in the tunnel under the Abbey. They weren’t able to recognize him then, so they and we were still thinking da Silva was the man in the long cloak. Lord Harold chases that long cloak into Netley Abbey, and because Harold cannot instantly adjust to his error of judgment, Orlando is able to stab him.
Thus the death of Lord Harold contains the elements of a Shakespearean tragedy: the noble hero with the fatal flaw; the affairs of governments and the peace of nations resting on the outcome of the conflict; the internal struggle of the hero against his fatal flaw (that lack of true judgment of other people), shown in his otherwise inexplicable delay in committing himself to Jane Austen; elements of the supernatural in the stories of the ghosts of Netley Abbey; elements of comedic relief in the witty exchanges among characters who interact with the brilliant Miss Austen; and finally, catharsis in the terrible suffering we know Jane undergoes.
Two women characters and the men in their circle comprise the major red herrings. The mysteries surrounding these women provide much of the rich layers of this story.
Sophia Challoner, the woman Lord Harold Trowbridge identifies to Jane as a formidable French weapon, is actually just a widow who hates him for being responsible for killing a man with whom she was in love in Portugal. Sophia is neither working for France nor for England; she works only to help Mrs. Fitzherbert get her son back to safety. Harold is wrong about Sophia, as Jane has thought, and it has been a point that threatened to divide Harold and Jane (and it is yet another instance of Lord Harold judging wrongly). Sophia decides to marry the military da Silva brother and go back to Portugal, which she feels is her home.
Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Prince of Wales’s mistress and illegal wife, is the mother of the mysterious American gentleman, Mr Ord. Mr Ord and the French-speaking religious da Silva brother, who is given the title monsignor, are intent upon getting back to America to escape their various problems in England. I’m not sure what Mr Ord was ever doing visiting England anyway. Supposedly he’s making his “Grand Tour,” but since he was destined for the priesthood, what’s the point? Well, the story needed him to come and confuse matters, and he did a very good job of that.
Jane and her household—her mother, Martha Lloyd, and her sister, Cassandra (who spends the time of this novel in Kent where her brother Edward and his family are mourning the death of his wife)—are on the point of accepting Edward’s offer of Chawton Cottage for their future home, and they will move there when the heartbreaking winter is over.
This novel is certainly one of the very best of the series.
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Jane and His Lordship’s Legacy
As a genealogist, I very much enjoyed that the solution to this mystery lies in a thorough understanding of very complicated family trees and family histories. This is right up my alley, but Stephanie Barron confused me with her everlastingly clever red herrings. You see, one family tree reveals the murderer, but all are necessary to understand which ones contain duplicitous branches.
Freddy Vansittart, second son of the Earl of Holbrook, becomes the Earl after his father and then his older brother both have died. Freddy, in India, returns by ship in 1785 to England. Also on board are Lord Harold Trowbridge, Freddy’s great friend, and a French girl, Hélène de Pont-Ravel, the 18-year-old daughter of the Comte de Pont-Ravel, traveling to England to be married. She and Freddy fall in love and have an affair, and she becomes his mistress in Paris. She bears him a son within the year. When the French Revolution erupts, Freddy cannot get to them, and he sends Harold to rescue them. Harold succeeds in rescuing the boy, now age 6, but Hélène de Pont-Ravel is sent to the guillotine despite everything Harold tries to do to rescue her.
Freddy in the meantime marries a proper English lady, and they have a daughter, Imogen. Freddy’s wife is actually not all that proper—she soon ran off with a Cavalry officer and is out of the picture. Imogen grows up as Freddy’s spoiled heir.
Freddy’s son grows up in Europe, has a gentleman’s education, and comes to England as a rival heir to Imogen. They both want the estate, Stonings, and Freddy is debating what to do for each of them before he reveals to the world that Julian is his bastard heir. Freddy’s title goes by entail to the grandson of a much-older cousin. Freddy’s cousin twice removed happens to be the steward of Stonings, lame Major Spence, who has tried in vain to woo and win Imogen.
(An Aside: There are genealogical problems with Freddy’s son’s history. Julian is said (p 168) by Maria Beckford to have been educated by Henry Fox, who, because he eloped with a then-married Lady, had to live abroad. This Henry Fox is supposed to be the nephew of the great, late Whig leader Henry Fox, who died in 1774. This nephew is said to be now Lord Holland. Maybe Maria got her information wrong, but she says they engaged Julian as a tutor and he lived with them for some time, and also that her brother-in-law John Middleton had been at school with Henry Fox, so she should have had the story straight. But it doesn’t fit the facts. The late Whig leader Henry Fox was the one who eloped with Lady Caroline Lennox, who was not married before, and after she was created Baroness Holland, he was given the title of Baron as well and became Lord Holland. It is his sons and grandsons who are the successive Lords Holland. His only nephew named Henry is surnamed Fox-Strangway and was the 2nd Earl of Ilchester, who died in 1802. Second, the correspondence of Lord Harold Trowbridge seems to indicate that it was the Whig politician Charles Fox, the son of Henry and Lady Caroline, who was involved in Julian’s life and education, but only very briefly, as Charles mostly lived in England. The mistakes in the story told by Maria Beckford may have been a deliberate by the author, but if so, she failed to follow up by showing later that it was a deliberate attempt at disguising the truth about Julian Thrace for some good reason or other, and this remains looking like research errors. If it is merely the author creating a fictional nephew and family for the real Lord Holland, it is awkwardly done and a mistake altogether. But if anybody figures out how this could be explained to the author’s credit, let me know!)
Secondarily to Freddy’s family tree, we learn a bit of Lord Harold’s backstory. When he was sent to school at the tender age of 7 (1767), he became Fag to an older student named Benning who treated him abominably. In 1782 Harold wounded Benning in a duel. The wound became infected, and Benning’s father, the Viscount St. Eustace, suffered a fit at the news and died, making the hated Benning the new Viscount St. Eustace, and thus a social superior to Lord Harold, who as the second son of a duke is actually a commoner. Add to that the fact that Harold had fallen in love with Horatia, the girl betrothed to Benning, and they had an affair, making her two months’ pregnant with Harold’s child when she married St. Eustace. Her husband tortured her, and in the winter of 1783 she died in childbirth along with the baby while Harold was in India.
When Harold and Freddy meet Hélène de Pont-Ravel on the ship to England in 1785, Harold discovers she is betrothed to the widowed Viscount St. Eustace because St. Eustace, a family friend, is rich enough to bail out the Comte de Pont-Ravel. Harold at first is happy to take revenge on St Eustace and encourage Freddy. But when it comes to the point, Harold empathizes with the girl and writes in his diary that he pities the powerlessness of women like Hélène, and he goes so far as to argue with Freddy against ruining her life after all.
Harold has been working in India for Warren Hastings (Eliza de Feullide’s reputed natural father), Governor-General of Bengal, and when Edmund Burke and Harold’s friend Charles James Fox succeed in having Hastings recalled, Lord Harold returns to England with Hastings (and Freddy Vansittart). When the French Revolution gets underway in June 1791, Lord Harold is happy to work with Charles Fox to forward its aims, but soon he (and the rest of the Whig party) are appalled by the bloodthirsty revolutionaries. Harold engages Geoffrey Sidmouth to help smuggle nobles and goods out of France.
Then in the present story, Lord Harold’s Bengal chest full of his papers is stolen from Jane Austen, and Jane is not able to read more, so the next fifteen years of Harold’s life is yet to be learned.
But there are other family histories we need to understand. The most difficult is the way Jane Austen’s family was related to both the Knight family of Kent that adopted her brother Edward, and to the Hinton family of Chawton that claimed to be the legal heirs-of-body of the Knight family of Chawton; and how those two Knight families were related to one another.
First, the Knight family of Kent that adopted Edward Austen consisted of Thomas Knight and his second wife, Catherine Knatchbull. Thomas Knight’s first wife was Jane Monk; she and the Reverend George Austen (father of Jane, Edward, and all the other siblings) were both great-grandchildren of John Austen and Jane Atkins. Below is a diagram that shows these details (adapted from https://janeausteninvermont.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/knight-estates1.jpg).
Now it gets more complicated. Thomas Knight was born Thomas Brodnax, a son of William Brodnax and Anne May. Thomas changed his surname to May when he inherited his grandparents’ estate. Thomas’s mother’s cousin Frances married a man named Michael Martin; Michael’s cousin Joan married a Hinton. Michael Martin’s mother was a Knight who had inherited the Chawton estate. Michael and Frances’s daughter Elizabeth Knight inherited the Chawton estates. She married but had no children, so her will set up this very complicated legal labyrinth that allowed her mother’s cousin’s son Thomas Brodnax/May/Knight of Kent to inherit the Chawton estates, rather than allowing the other cousins the Hintons to inherit them. Here is a tree that shows more clearly how the Hinton, Martin, Knight, and Brodnax families are connected (adapted from http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol35no1/grover.html).
And finally, here is the continuation of the Hinton family, including the Baverstocks, who all feature in this convoluted tale of the impact of family connections and how they can lead to murderous impulses. (Adapted from http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol35no1/grover.html.)
These people were in the process of a very complex and long-lasting lawsuit against Edward Austen Knight, hoping to prove that he was not the rightful heir to the Chawton estates. This was something of a scary thing in real life for Jane Austen, her mother, and her sister. If the Hintons were to prevail, Edward would lose all the property he owned and administered in Chawton and its environs. Fortunately, the Hintons did not eventually win; but in 1814 Edward Knight had to pay them some £15,000, of which £10,000 went to Jane Baverstock and £5,000 to John Knight Hinton. Edward paid this money by selling off timber from Chawton Wood Park. During the action of this novel, Jack Hinton and his sister were living in Chawton Lodge, opposite the Great House (Chawton Manor).
Adding to the general confusion of families, we need to keep in mind a number of the inhabitants of Chawton and Alton.
The Middleton family rents Chawton Great House (the manor) from Edward Austen. They consist at this time of the father, John-Charles, a widower whose wife’s sister Maria Beckford lives with the family as hostess; the eldest son who is away at sea; daughters Susan, Charlotte-Maria, Lucy, Charlotte-Lydia-Elizabeth; and the youngest son, Frederick-Graeme, age 6.
Mr. John-Rawston Papillon, a clergyman, was given the Chawton Living by Mrs. Knight, the stepmother of Edward Austen. Mr. Papillon and his spinster sister, Elizabeth, who keeps house for him, live in the restored old Rectory. Mrs. Austen hopes to make a match between this clergyman and one of her daughters.
The Prowtings of Chawton consist of the father, William, the county magistrate in Chawton as well as Deputy Lieutenant, his wife, and his daughters, Catherine-Ann and Ann-Mary. When Catherine comes under Jane Austen’s suspicions, it develops that this young lady has people and things to hide.
Mrs Libby Cuttle of Chawton bakes bread for the village, but she won’t sell to the Austens because she is allied to the Hintons, or maybe because she doesn’t like the way Edward Austen treated the Widow Seward.
Old Philmore owns some run-down cottages in one of which lives Miss Benn, an impoverished gentlewoman, nearsighted, voluble, and easily distracted. The Philmores and the Frenches are numerous in the area and are working class. Important to our story are Shafto French, the corpse; Shafto’s wife; Bertie Philmore, who fought with Shafto and spends most of the story in jail for his murder; and Old Philmore, Bertie’s uncle, who with Bertie broke into Chawton Cottage and stole Jane Austen’s Bengal chest that Lord Harold bequeathed to her, full of his letters, diaries, and other papers.
The Widow Seward is the former inhabitant of Chawton Cottage, and she has gone to live with her daughter, now Mrs. James Baverstock, who is related to the whole Hinton-Knight mess, in Alton, within walking distance of Chawton. The Baverstocks have a brewery.
Sally Mitchell, the maid the Prowtings find for the Austens, comes from Alton. Her older brother is married to Nell, whose sister Rosie is married to Bertie Philmore.
Also in Alton are Henry Austen’s bank branch, Austen, Gray & Vincent, and the house that Frank Austen’s wife Mary has rented, Rose Cottage in Lenton Street.
Now that you know all the Who, you can figure out the why and how! I think this novel is excellently constructed (with that one exception), with Freddy’s identity as Lord Holbrook withheld until the very end, when what Jane has been reading among Lord Harold’s papers becomes crucial to understanding the present mystery. It is also entertaining to read the exchange between Freddy and Jane when she reveals to him who she is in relation to his old friend:
“Harry’s papers?” The Earl glanced at me in a startled fashion. “Thought he left them to some light o’ love by way of payment for services rendered. Heard it from Wilborough myself. Poor old fellow expects to be petitioned with blackmail at every moment. Dashed odd of Harry, my opinion! Must have been devilish smitten with the gel.”
“Lord Harold left all his papers to me,” I replied with what I thought was commendable command of countenance. The Earl’s expression of shock was so blatant as to border on the insulting.
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Jane and the Barque of Frailty
I thought Jane and the Barque of Frailty, the ninth novel of detection featuring Jane Austen, was very well written, with a tightly plotted mystery that has government intrigue, passion, scandal, and very diverting antics throughout. And the great Stephanie Barron has not lost her touch for mimicking Jane Austen’s voice.
Jane is in London supervising the publication of Sense and Sensibility and staying with her brother Henry and his wife, Eliza, the Comtesse de Feuillide in the interim. They have paid the initial costs of publication for her, which Jane would shortly recoup and repay, beyond the limits of this novel.
When the Princess Evgenia Tscholikova is found with a cut throat upon the steps of Lord Castlereagh’s home near the neighborhood of the Austens, Jane feels called upon to prove that it was not suicide and to bring the culprit to justice. Her detective activities are great fun to read.
This involves her indulging in intrigues of all kinds in order to do what propriety would otherwise forbid. She attends the inquest to observe everyone and is surprised to find that her brother has to give evidence. She is amused that she is not the only Austen who keeps her loved ones in the dark. She sneaks out of the house to consort with the dead woman’s maidservant. She goes alone to visit a solicitor. She and Eliza play various tricks upon their acquaintances to find things out. Jane goes to the home of one of the high-class courtesans, the one who is referenced in the title of the novel. She and Eliza run afoul of the Bow Street Runners and conceal the incident and its ramifications entirely from Henry. They even dress as courtesans themselves and attend a highly scandalous ball, suitably masked, in order to unmask the murderer.
[Spoiler]
The solution involves some of the real-life spy scandals of that period. Lord Castlereagh’s chief competitor in government, George Canning, has employed the Comte D’ Entraigue as a spy. This man was actually a double and even triple agent, and even to this day nobody knows to whom his true allegiance was given, if to any. For the purposes of the novel, the Comte also compromised the Princess while in Vienna, and he also is acquainted with the eponymous Barque of Frailty, Julia Radcliffe, but it turns out that his 19-year-old son is the one who is besotted with Julia. The Comte just admires. Julia, meanwhile, reveals to Jane that when Julia was 14, her cousin raped her, and when her father insisted she marry him, the cousin raped her again and she became pregnant. So then the family threw her out. She embarked on a career of flaunting herself in London society to take revenge on her family. The cousin, meanwhile, is employed as secretary to Lord Castlereagh, who is a homosexual and has made advances to the secretary, which the secretary allows but vows revenge for. He has also had a torrid affair with the Princess in Paris, where he had become a Bonaparte spy. He publishes the Princess’s letters to him in the newspapers under the fiction that they are written to Castlereagh; this is the secretary’s revenge upon him. But the Princess goes looking for him that night, and comes out of Julia Radcliffe’s totally inebriated, with the Comte D’ Entraigue looking after her. He takes her to Castlereagh’s and puts her on the front steps, dead drunk but alive, with her porcelain box of letters from the secretary beside her. The secretary, Malverley, comes out (he was copying the papers of Castlereagh to send to his spymasters), smashes the porcelain box, destroys the letters, and cuts her throat.
I could here embark on a philosophical treatise on how Jane Austen and Julia Radcliffe come close to being foils for each other, but I will leave that for another post. Suffice to say Julia in the end of this novel retires from society, takes a house in rural Gloucestershire, and superintends the rearing and education of her son. And her life provides Jane with an idea that subsequently would become Mansfield Park.
[end spoiler]
Poignantly, Jane wishes for Lord Harold, as he could have helped her negotiate the intrigues within the government and their implications. She dreams of him, and she goes to the solicitor’s office where his papers are kept safe, in order to read. She derives both comfort and clues to the mystery from his writings. She meets more people in this novel who had known the Gentleman Rogue, and she gains their respect when they find out the respect that Harold had had for Jane, in the form of his having bequeathed all his papers to her. His legacy continues to help her detection and yet to provide a note of melancholy at what never could be.
But Jane’s wit does not fail. In contemplating a very popular book that had just been published about which everybody was raving, Mary Brunton’s Self-Controul, Jane muses, “Of what use is it to reside for a time in the very centre of the world, surrounded by every possible whim or comfort, if one cannot obtain Self-Controul?” When she finally does obtain and read the novel, she is comforted to be underwhelmed, lest it compare unfavorably with her own works.
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Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron
Time: 25 April 1813 – 15 May 1813
Places: Chawton, London, Chawton, London, Brighton
The book opens sadly with the death of Henry Austen’s wife, Eliza de Feuillide, from breast cancer. Jane and Henry decide to go to Brighton to recover. Enroute, they rescue 15-year-old Catherine Twining from being abducted by Lord Byron and deliver her to her father’s house in Brighton, where she is immediately mistrusted and abused by her tyrannical father.
In the town library, Jane meets the Countess Desdemona Swithin, and instead of acting horribly to Jane as in His Lordship’s Legacy, Mona is friendly. Jane is on her guard, but in this book, Mona works at becoming Jane’s friend. She uses some rather brutal confrontation tactics to achieve it though—at one point she brings Jane to the point of tears in telling her that she knew her uncle, Lord Harold Trowbridge, had intended to marry Jane. It is astonishing to me that this makes Jane trust her the more. Set against how coldly and rudely Mona behaved at the time of Lord Harold’s death, and how she seemed to blame Jane for inheriting the Bengal chest of papers, I cannot understand exactly how she gets a pass in this book by admitting that she knew all along what their relationship was and yet still acted badly toward Jane at the time.
Nevertheless, their detective partnership is delightful. They investigate two historical figures with lots of terrible baggage regarding Lord Byron, specifically, his lovers Lady Caroline Lamb and the Countess of Oxford. They also investigate Byron himself, and Jane feels the power of his personality. Jane voices to Mona a melancholic longing for Lord Harold to have lived, so that his abilities could have helped them solve the murder.
[Spoiler]:
Hang on, the solution is complicated, as is true of all the Jane Austen mysteries. Young Catherine Twining goes to the Assembly with her father and her chaperone (another ineffectual chaperone in this novel; one might almost be able to write a treatise on the bad chaperones in this series), Mrs. Louisa Silchester. Catherine dances the first two dances with Mr. Hendred Smalls, the almost-elderly chaplain her father intends her to marry, then she dances with another man, and after that with her lover, Captain (Viscount) Morley, aka Phillip Barrett, who just happens to be the nephew of the man who eloped with Catherine’s mother and died in a duel with Catherine’s father. Catherine’s father, General Twining, leaves the Assembly and goes to the Prince Regent’s Pavilion at the invitation of his degenerate old friend Colonel George Hanger (who had already tried to rape Catherine in the Pavilion a few days since) to play at hazard and drink. They get roaring drunk. Meanwhile, back at the Assembly, Catherine is bothered no end by Lord Bryon who wants to speak to her. Morley makes short work of him, but Catherine’s next dance partner is Scrope Davies, great friend of Bryon but also in love with Catherine AND her neighbor across the street. In comes Lady Caro Lamb in Greek costume, disrupts the entire Assembly and routs Byron, who leaves. Lady Caro snags Catherine and takes her off to the Pavilion, with Morley to escort them there. Morley has been invited (or commanded) by Hanger to play hazard too, so he leaves the women and joins Hanger and Twining. He stays barely a half hour, enduring verbal abuse by Twining, who leaves, and then by Hanger, who suggests Catherine is a whore like her mother. Morley leaves Hanger, meets Twining and knocks him down, and Morley leaves the Pavilion. Just minutes later, Bryon arrives at the Pavilion and bursts in on the women. Caro distracts Byron and Catherine escapes. Twining awakes to see Byron going in, then Catherine coming out disheveled. He follows Catherine, drags her across the shingle and drowns her in the surf. Hanger sees the corpse later and wades out to the Giaour (Byron’s yacht) and grabs a hammock with the name of the yacht on it, borrows a needle and thread from the under-groomsman at the Pavilion who had been attending to a foaling and had seen Catherine exit, and Hanger sews up a quick shroud around Catherine’s body and carries it through the tunnel to the King’s Arms inn and puts it in the bed lately hired by Byron, where the corpse is discovered a few hours later by the morning maid. Byron had settled his bill before going to the Pavilion, and he spends the rest of the night at Scrope Davies’s house. He is arrested for the murder, but Jane and Mona find out the truth and tell him. Byron forces the General to write a confession and the General kills himself. Byron incorporates the truth in his poem, The Giaour. [End spoiler.]
The complexity is highly satisfying to the reader of murder mysteries, and the detection proceeds with intelligence and little wasted time or effort. Jane, Mona, Henry, and Mona’s husband make no wrong turns or stupid moves that put them into peril, always my pet peeves with mysteries. (I don’t mind peril through mischance, but I hate it when the sleuth is simply careless, or especially, stupid.)
The other satisfactory element is the wit and voice of Jane Austen. In this novel, it is again pitch-perfect, with her dryly amusing comments on people, situations, and her own self just what I imagine Jane Austen to have sounded like in contemplating a murder mystery. In an afterward interview, author Stephanie Barron talks about how in some of the series she consulted the letters minutely to construct the outline of the story, carefully going line by line through the letters of a particular period of time. But in this one, she gave herself free rein to invent nearly everything, given only that Jane was known to be with her brother Henry at this time, and that Lord Byron was known to have first published The Giaour in a 700-line version the very next month, although the two authors were never known to have met. In this interview the author also calls attention to the curious fact that when Lord Byron died, his body was denied burial at Westminster Abbey and was taken to the London home of Jane Austen’s niece Fanny Austen Knight, then married to Sir Edward Knatchbull. Very interesting connection!
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Jane and the Canterbury Tale
Time: 20 Oct 1813 – 29 Oct 1813; Afterword 11 Nov 1813
Place: Godmersham and Canterbury, Kent and environs
The mystery is perfect. There are plenty of plausible suspects, and if the obviously innocent people are arrested at first, it feels inevitable and yet never quite hopeless, even when evidence piles up that makes things look worse and worse for the hapless prisoner. Near the end there are a couple of very tight plot twists, perfectly constructed and perfectly logical, but nevertheless red herrings. At least, partly so! I won’t spoil which parts are true and which misleading.
It’s interesting that for the time and place, Adelaide Fiske MacCallister seems to have been forgiven her rather wild past by nearly everybody in the close society of the big houses around Canterbury. Her age is deceptive in this story, as her wild past is written as if it were a distant past. It seems as if her husband Curzon Fiske has been gone a lot longer than only three years. He and Adelaide ran away when she was about 17, and she’s only 24 here. Formerly-wild Adelaide now turning respectable makes a fine foil for Jane Austen’s niece Fanny Knight.
Twenty-year-old Fanny has had to assume the duties of the lady of the house since her mother’s death five years before, and she is essentially a serious person. Now here we see her interest in romance, particularly with the “bad boy” of the bunch she knows. She keeps which young gentleman she likes the best to herself, being an accomplished diplomat. She seems to like Julian Thane, the one who is more a rake than the other young men, who include James Beckford Wildman who is to inherit Chilham Castle; serious John Plumptre, who asks Fanny to waltz too late; George “Jupiter” Finch-Hatton of Eastwell (which family we met in Genius of the Place) who lounges about to cover his nervousness but who is also sharp witted and insightful; and also in the young men’s group are Fanny’s brothers Edward and George, who are off to their term at Oxford the day before the mystery is solved.
Here we also get a good rounded view of Jane’s brother Edward Knight, five years a widower and not reconciled to it; definitely not going to marry again. The scene in the night where Jane dons a wrapper over her nightdress and crouches on the stair to await his return home is heart wrenching as both Edward and the butler momentarily mistake her pale, wraithlike form rising from the bottom stair as the ghost of their late wife and mistress. Thinking of those who are gone gives Jane the occasion to bring back the time she sat writing in the little temple on the hill at Godmersham, as she watched Lord Harold climbing up the hill to find her. It is a tiny piece of this novel, but it provides the continuity of that story arc through this entire series.
Edward’s position as the local magistrate makes him the chief investigator of the murder of Adelaide’s first husband, and it is extremely logical for Edward to ask Jane to help him, since he knows her ability in regards to the murder explained in Genius of the Place, and he may have heard something of her exploits from family members other than Cassandra.
That Jane’s and Cassandra’s letters to one another entirely omit mention of any of the mysteries Jane has elucidated is explained logically here as it has been built up over the course of the series: Cassandra disapproves of Jane investigating things, especially as doing so has thrown her into the society of people Cassandra cannot approve (Lord Harold Trowbridge, mainly).
[Spoiler]
The solution to the mystery is that Augusta Thane, formidable mother of Adelaide and Julian, found out that old Mr. James Wildman had in his will that if his son and heir, James Beckford Wildman, predeceased his father, then the estate and Castle Chilham would go to cousin Julian Thane (Augusta’s son) rather than be divided between the two Wildman daughters. Augusta badly wanted the inheritance for her son. She also wanted her daughter respectably married to Captain MacCallister. When Adelaide’s first husband turns up at the wedding celebration, she arranges to meet him, but Augusta intercepts her messenger, pretends to be Adelaide, and uses James Beckford Wildman’s pistol to shoot Curzon Fiske on the side-path near St. Lawrence churchyard, leaving the pistol to be found in the churchyard to incriminate its owner. She hopes JBW hangs for the crime, but when Adelaide is arrested, she does not try to do anything to free her, preferring to ensure than Julian becomes rich than that Adelaide lives! When Augusta finds out that Julian has been dallying with the maid Martha Kean and that Martha is with child, she arranges to meet Martha at the copse near the path between Godmersham and Castle Chilham, and, pretending to be Julian until Martha is close enough, she grabs her and slits her throat. Augusta wants no impediment to the possible match between her son and the chief heiress of the neighborhood, Fanny Knight. Thankfully Augusta writes a full confession before she throws herself from the tower in Chilham Castle.
Red herrings carefully and logically presented include suspecting Adelaide of Curzon Fiske’s murder, suspecting James Wildman, suspecting the baronet-seaman Sir Davie Myrrh and his “solicitor” Mr. Burbage, suspecting Captain MacCallister and Julian Thane, and suspecting George Moore. It looks as if Julian murdered the maid until late in the unfolding of the tale. The revelation of Mr. Wildman’s will makes Jane construct a wholly plausible, wholly erroneous theory that I won’t spoil by writing out. [End Spoiler]
This mystery is written so closely to Jane Austen’s own style that it is another complete delight in this series.
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Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas
Time: Prologue, 24 Dec 1814 – 5 Jan 1815; Afterword, 2 March 1815
Place: Hampshire: 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 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.
The uneasy political situation of the end of 1814 with Napoleon Buonaparte exiled to Elba and with peace talks occurring in Ghent between the British and the Americans provides background for the action and context for the gathering of some of the characters present at The Vyne as guests.
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 in the 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 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.
I don’t know if the Christmas festivities work to lighten the mood after all. There is plenty of comic exchange of barbed insults, both spoken and unspoken (the latter thought of and set down in Jane Austen’s satirical voice). For example, she muses, “I had once played Miss Candour myself, at a vanished revel. The rôle consisted of telling every other guest exactly what one thought of him. I had enjoyed the masquerade enormously” (p 103).
The murders, though, are terrible. Two likeable people are the victims, and that does tend to present a situation that cannot easily be lightened, not like when someone that nobody likes is done in, and everybody has a motive. But Jane’s efforts to help solve the mysteries are well done, and all the red herrings (Stephanie Barron’s forte is in well-placed red herrings) are dealt with competently.
[Spoiler]
The son of famous painter Benjamin West, Raphael West turns out to be a government spy, something like Lord Harold Trowbridge, of whom Jane thinks often as West and his role and intelligence and appreciation of Jane all bring the late Gentleman Rogue to Jane’s mind. He identifies the secretary Benedict L’Anglois as a French spy, someone he’s been trying to catch. L’Anglois tries to get Mary Gambier to help him get the draft Treaty of Ghent from John Gage, the military messenger who is carrying it from Ghent to London, who happens to love Mary and she him. She refuses, and L’Anglois kills Gage to steal the treaty. Mary is then murdered by her own aunt, the estranged wife of Admiral James Gambier, who sent the Treaty via Gage on its way to Parliament.
This might have something to do with my not liking the mood of the book. When a murderer is free at the end, I feel let down. While Louisa is left completely alone in Bath at the end, none of her family wanting any more to do with her, the other murderer also gets away. L’Anglois escapes back to France, and there he helps rally the people to welcome Napoleon back when he escapes from Elba in the last days of February 1815. Knowing that Napoleon would have a reign of just over 100 days gives the slender hope that one of his followers might meet justice in a different form during that time.
[End Spoiler]
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.
A few random thoughts I had about the book concern the story arc of Lord Harold Trowbridge. He is invoked several times through the course of the story by Jane thinking of him, being reminded of him by Raphael West, who has the same penetrating intelligence and who appears to appreciate her in a similar way. He even offers Jane immediate sympathy for her loss when they talk of Lord Harold. That he accepts her right to sympathy in the matter of Lord Harold’s death is amazing under the circumstances, but then, West is an American, and they don’t follow societal rules, as everyone knows. Jane denies the attraction she feels for West, especially when she suspects her sister of developing a tender feeling for the artist. She recalls how her mother said once that if Cassandra were to go to her execution, Jane would beg to go too, and she obeys the loyalty of a lifetime by disavowing the mutual attraction between her and West. She takes it even to the point of lying about the scene at dawn when West awakes from a coma and stumbles out of his room just as Jane, who had been delivering little Caroline’s daily gift, comes back past his room and catches him before he falls. They kiss. That’s what I object to. How could she not dodge and remain loyal to the memory of Lord Harold? I’m all for the Anne Elliott brand of faithfulness, and it’s what I expect of Jane Austen herself. However, if she did allow it to happen, why did Cassandra have to see it? That’s unkind. Wasn’t there a better way for Cassandra to come to a realization that her feelings were foolish without having her sister be the agent? The sisters’ subsequent conversation goes a long way to mitigating my outrage, but still. I stand by my feeling that the kiss and Cassandra seeing it were not necessary to the story and called Jane Austen’s creation of Anne Elliott into question.
I haven’t talked yet about the depiction of Cassandra throughout the series as a rather prudish, wet-blanket type of person. I get that it works best if Cassandra does not like her sister to be a detective, so Jane keeps her detective activity to herself. Otherwise the existing letters between them don’t make sense. Stephanie Barron had to be careful to keep things real, but I’m afraid she tripped a few times into making Cassandra unsympathetic to Jane. The sisters are known for being extremely close and for being extremely loyal. In this book I feel that their relationship is depicted in the most realistic light of the series. Here we see what Jane had created between Jane and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, from a different angle. It works well (even that seeming betrayal of the kiss shows the bond between the sisters as unbreakable).
Another characterization that underwent a change in this book is that of the sisters’ mother. In the earlier books Mrs. Austen is the hypochondriac, fretful and selfish, a model for Mary Musgrove and for Mrs. Bennet combined. But here it’s Mrs. James Austen who takes the Mary Musgrove role, and Mrs. George Austen becomes amusing, witty, talented, and much more the mother figure that I had all along suspected she was in reality. Certainly mothers and daughters don’t always see eye to eye, and I expect that Jane had problems with her mother in reality, but not like the mothers or sisters in her books.
Mary Austen though, I can believe that Jane found satisfaction in putting one or two of her complaints about her sister-in-law into that character. Having Mary’s husband, Jane’s brother James, be pompous and difficult in this book was interesting, especially when he is given a speech about Jane running on in the “wild manner” she is suffered to do at home—a speech every Austen fan knows was already in print in Pride and Prejudice when he uttered it here! It gives extra weight to every critical thing he says in this story about her being a published author. He’s jealous, madly jealous, and he secretly reads and rereads her books because they are so good and they make him so angry that they aren’t his own that he subconsciously memorizes a number of the best lines and uses them without even realizing that his sister is going to recognize them. (Stephanie Barron doesn’t have Jane make any note of this, so this all is simply me fabricating an entire set of motives and characterization from that speech. Did the author not realize in giving James that speech that it created an improbable loop that could be resolved only through the kind of character flaws I ascribe to James?)
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 decision not 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 successfully 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. This is a great read for the Christmas break, every year.
Jane and the Waterloo Map
Time: 13 Nov 1815 – 24 Nov 1815; Afterword, 11 Dec 1815
Place: London
Jane Austen is with her brother Henry at his home in London, nursing him back to health, and proofing the sheets of her novel Emma as they come off the press. She is asked to come to Carlton House, the London residence of the Prince Regent, at the request of the Regent’s librarian, James Stanier Clarke, to tour the place and discuss dedicating her latest book to HRH. As they enter the great library, they find a man dying.
Thus Jane Austen’s last case is “The Body in the Library,” a nod to Miss Marple’s first case.
The dying man was Colonel Eustace MacFarland, a hero of Waterloo. Jane finds out quickly that he was poisoned with yew and begins to search for a murderer, despite the seeming dismissal she receives from the Court Physician, Matthew Baillie, who had been treating Henry Austen, and who treated MacFarland at the end.
Her first attempts discover that the Colonel’s sister has a lover, Dunross, a military comrade of MacFarland’s who had fallen out with him over the issue of the mysterious Waterloo Map. Dunross ensures the dismissal of MacFarland’s former batman, then his butler, Spence, and Jane Austen finds Spence employment with Raphael West, the son of the famous painter.
Clues are carefully placed to ensure that we suspect Dunross, Baillie, and even West for a moment (he was actually in Carlton House at the time of the death). We totally miss the fact that the only person who unites the entire circle of people is Spence, even when first Miss Austen is attacked, then Baillie, then Mrs. Gauthier (the wife of the man who had painted the Waterloo Map), and finally Raphael West. We mostly suspect Dunross, then at the climactic moment, we see Baillie in position to be the culprit, but in a final plot twist just seconds later, Spence is revealed as the killer.
It seems that Spence had become jealous and bitter over the economic disparities between himself and his master despite their equal share of risk in battle. During the battle of Waterloo when MacFarland had been taken prisoner by the French, Spence took the remaining horse and ended up with a gang of Prussians who murdered and looted the Emperor’s coach train. Spence gets the Waterloo Map off the body of the Court Cartographer and figures it’s valuable, though he cannot read. When he’s reunited with MacFarland after all, MacFarland reveals what the map is: a direction to the loot from the abortive Moscow invasion by the French a few years before, when they had to escape the burning city and chose to do so with a supply train full of loot instead of the provisions they needed to survive a Russian winter. They had abandoned the loot in a couple of places and the Cartographer had drawn the locations and encoded a message describing the treasure and its fate. MacFarland keeps the map from Spence, argues with Dunross about what to do with it, and eventually decides to hand it over to the Duke of Wellington the morning that Jane Austen happens to be in Carlton House.
I don’t like the modern mind-set of the villain. His feeling that there should be economic equality between himself and his superior officer who comes from a higher class of society just does not seem realistic for that time period. People knew their place and generally they stayed in it. And yet, why not? A villain is a person who refuses to obey the rules, and certainly there was something wrong about Spence that both MacFarland and Dunross realized a little too late, that forced them both to reject him. MacFarland tried both rejecting and keeping the status quo, to his mortal cost. Dunross fired Spence “without a character”; something that Jane Austen should have looked into before accepting Spence’s version of things without reservation. But at the time, she suspected Dunross, so we excuse her. And yet, Spence roused no suspicion by any action of his own until that final scene at the coaching inn. Should he not have seemed a bit “off” somehow in his conversations with Jane Austen? Was he really that good at hiding his true character? I guess so, but I feel that somehow there was a clue missing here.
I appreciated the mystery and detection; I mostly appreciated Jane Austen’s voice, for it is the closest to the real thing we have, and yet, here a certain arrogance about her writing ability creeps in. Of course she has reason to be a good judge of superior writing! Her novels have never been out of print since 1833, and she herself was not averse to giving solid advice on writing to her nieces and nephews.
Yet in her smug self-congratulations on her epigrams, there is a certain something that jars. It is closely allied with her attitude toward Henry letting slip Jane’s authorship to all and sundry. She indulges him, and in this version of herself, she seems to secretly want everyone to know her ability and her achievements, which to me does not ring true. Here, she veers perilously close to modern ambition for a career, and little real aversion to fame gradually overtaking her.
It is reality that the secret of her authorship obviously was not well enough kept to prevent the Prince Regent from learning about it and his Librarian, James Stanier Clarke, from asking Miss Austen to come to Carlton House and to dedicate Emma to His Royal Highness. After Jane Austen died, Henry wrote a biographical note about the author for the combined publication he and Cassandra did of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, and that is how the world at large learned the identity of the author.
This story follows up Jane’s acquaintance with Raphael West, formed in Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas, with further development of a relationship between them, veering into definite romantic territory. Jane dreams of him, she reacts physically to his touch, and she acknowledges jealous feelings when her niece Fanny seems interested in him too. She keeps her feelings in check, however, using her experience with Lord Harold Trowbridge both as a comparison and as a caution against allowing any further development. She knows that her heart was completely broken and still not mended by the death of the Gentleman Rogue, and she decides she cannot risk her heart again. But it takes a struggle for her to successfully master herself. It’s a beautifully moving piece of realism about how the heart works, about how romantic attachment begins and can end if necessary. This truly is the woman who knew exactly where the line between sense and sensibility should and could be drawn.
All in all, I enjoyed this book, but I don’t think it was one of the best of the series. In fact, I’m sorry that it was one of my least favorite.
I wanted there to be one more mystery for Jane to solve before she became too ill to proceed. But this book ends in December 1815, and within the next two or three months, Jane Austen began to feel her illness encroaching. She continued to write, finishing her first draft of The Elliotts (Persuasion) by spring, and revising the last two chapters by August 1816. She then started writing The Brothers (Sanditon) sometime in the fall, but she was too ill to write more than twelve chapters, putting her pen down for the last time in March 1817. With all her energy taken up in either writing those last works or in fighting her illness, she couldn’t have had any to spare for detection, and it would have been too sad to try to depict her struggle. Henry and Cassandra took her to Winchester for treatment in May after she had become confined to her bed, but to no avail.
Jane Austen died July 18, 1817 in Winchester.
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