Book Review - Stephanie Barron's Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor
Published by: Bantam
Publication Date: 1996
Format: Paperback, 304 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
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A cache of documents has been found. Could it be true that Jane Austen, that famous Regency writer, solved crimes when she wasn't writing her novels and sent the tales off to her nieces? Because that is what appears to be the case as Jane writes about what happened when she went to Scargrave Manor. Jane had just broken off her hastily made and even more hastily ended engagement to Harris Bigg-Wither. She had been lured in by the idea of a home and a family, but in the end realized that her and Harris Bigg-Wither would not suit. Needing to be elsewhere and not wanting the recriminations of her family Jane decides to visit her dear friend Isobel Payne. Jane and Isobel had became acquainted when the younger lady came to England from Barbados looking for a husband with her aunt and cousin in tow. She found a match in the older Earl of Scargrave. In fact they have just returned home from their honeymoon on the continent and are to have a lavish ball to celebrate their nuptials at their country seat. Jane arrives the night of the festivities, her friend seems happy, her new husband full of joy, but Isobel's husband takes a turn as the evening wears on. All assume it's just an attack of indigestion. He has seen a London doctor for a few years for his complaint. That doctor is summoned to the Earl's bedside and arrives in time to watch him die. How can Isobel be a widow in the early hours after her bridal ball? If all this wasn't bad enough, Isobel receives a poison pen letter saying that she did kill her husband because she is the lover of the new Earl, formerly the Viscount Payne! How could anyone say she was unfaithful to her husband with his heir? Yes, she secretly admits to Jane that they were in love, but she never acted on her feelings. But things look dire for the two. Yes, Jane could point the finger at George Hearst, the Earl's nephew who argued with him the night of his death, or Thomas Hearst, George's brother who was in a spot of bother. And what about Lord Harold Trowbridge? Arriving to torment Isobel because he wants her property in Barbados. There are too many suspects but only two with motive and means according to the law. So it is up to Jane to save her dear friend and find the real killer.
I find Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James very problematic. James obviously wanted to write a book on the oddities of Georgian and Regency law and quickly realized no one would want to read it so added a thin veneer of Jane Austen in order to trick us Janeites into reading her abysmal law treatise. If only she had done her research and realized her concept had been accomplished fifteen years prior far more successfully on every front, from understanding the trial process to actually making it about Jane Austen, by Stephanie Barron. Because a book about Jane Austen or her characters should be about her first and foremost and Stephanie got that. What amazes me is that Stephanie's long running series dropped at just the right time. America's obsession with Austen is dated firmly to 1996; Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility won all the awards, there were two versions of Emma, one on the small screen and one on the large, and who can forget Colin Firth and his wet shirt? Into this mix Stephanie Barron published her first Jane Austen mystery. So yes, I feel a little late to the party picking up the first book now, but at least this means I have a large back catalog to enjoy! Though it did take me awhile to warm to this murder mystery conceit. The bare bones are exactly the kind of book I dream of, a murder at a county estate during Christmas where everyone in the family is a suspect. But it took awhile to click because of two reasons; the footnotes and Austen's voice. So, this book has footnotes as part of the conceit that these events really happened to Jane and they are uncovered letters and journals. Therefore the footnotes are for clarity because in 1996 not many people were as Austen obsessed or Austen literate as now. So I found them intrusive and unnecessary, until I started to learn some interesting facts, so accepted them. As for Austen's voice, Barron perfectly captures it, it's just that where my brain was at when I started the book I wasn't sharp enough to enjoy it and therefore found it a hurdle that I had to overcome. But once the second murder happened it's like everything clicked into place. And I realized that it was the victim of the second crime that really did it for me because as I get older I have come to realize how much enjoyment I get out of the murder of uppity lady's maids. The Gilded Age really brought this home to me this year. In other words, kill the right person and I'm a happy camper.
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