Filmmakers gave Jane Austen a good ride in the last couple of years, adapting Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion and Emma (twice). Suddenly, Jane was cool. Empire dresses began showing up in designer collections, and Austen novels sat on the best-seller lists right next to the John Grishams and the Stephen Kings.
So a book like Stephanie Barron's Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (Bantam Books, 1996; $19.95) may have been as inevitable as it is enjoyable. The fictitious setup is high-concept but delicious: In the spring of 1995, a cache of long-lost Austen diaries and letters is discovered in the stone foundation of a Maryland estate (the family being distant American descendants of the novelist). To the amazement of the scholarly world, the manuscripts turn out to contain the "personal records of mysteries Jane Austen encountered and solved in the course of her short life." From there, the story is told in "Jane's" own voice.
It's an audacious and risky premise. You worry that the prose won't sound enough like Austen or that the historical facts will get fouled up or--worst of all--that it will fail as a page-turning mystery. By the end of the third chapter, though, all such fears disappear as you settle into a witty and entertaining tale.
The mystery itself begins at the country estate of Isobel, the Countess of Scargrave, a young friend of Jane's who has recently married the much older (and richer) Earl of Scargrave. On the night of the couple's wedding ball, the Earl falls ill. By morning, he's dead. After Isobel's personal maid accuses her and the Earl's handsome nephew of murder, the maid ends up with her throat slit.
Barron, MA '88, starts this plot in motion while deftly sketching a houseful of Austenesque characters, all of whom are possible murder suspects. There's Fitzroy, the handsome nephew, who stands to inherit the Earl's title and estate. There are the Hearst brothers: Thomas, a dashing and roguish lieutenant, and George, a grim-faced aspiring clergyman. Barron rounds out the household with a mysterious nobleman, a kindly old family friend and a snooty matron and her vain daughter. Jane--in the mode of a country-house Hercule Poirot--sets about analyzing the evidence and psychological motives of these suspects. As she unravels the tightly wound case, you begin to understand why Jane Austen makes the perfect detective: As in most of her novels, money, status and power are at the center of this story.
But the real fun here is the dead-on impersonation of Austen's prose, with all its genteel circumlocution and cutting understatement. If you read a bit of the real thing, say, a chapter of Emma, then turn back to Jane and the Unpleasantness, you get that giddy feeling of seeing and hearing a historical figure come to life with new immediacy. It's like watching an accomplished actor in a one-man show. Hal Holbrook is Mark Twain.
A snippet, as Jane dances at the ball: "I felt the absence of Tom Hearst, and knew not whether to wish for the return of such a man or no. But my confusion was to be of short duration. A parting of the crowd, a sight of a curly head, and a jaunty bow in my direction; and I found myself facing the Lieutenant not four couples removed from the Earl and his lady, in all the flushed excitement of a first dance."
Barron, who went by Francine Barron while studying history at Stanford, has been an Austen devotee since the fifth grade. She fleshes out Jane's character and propels the plot by incorporating facts from Austen's life: her refusal of a marriage proposal, her brother's standing in the Royal Navy, her fondness for country walks.
But the author isn't hemmed in by the conventions of Austen's writing. She allows her Jane a little more freedom to notice her subjects' interest in sex and low-cut dresses. Jane herself actually gets kissed in the moonlight. And the scope of the story goes beyond the drawing rooms, country houses and London shops of Austen. The murders--and Jane's role in figuring them out--draw national attention. That undermines the conceit that Austen's crime-solving exploits remained buried with her lost papers. But by the time the mystery has reached that gallop, you're having too much fun to be bothered by such niggling objections.
Jane and the Unpleasantness is the first in a series. The next book, Jane and the Man of the Cloth, is due out early this year. So brace yourself: Since Austen herself wrote just six novels, it may be only a matter of time before we see more of Austen--this time as a detective--on the big screen.
