ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

Hon Henry Berkeley Craven, miniature on ivory by George Sanders. Henry Augustus Berkeley Craven was Elizabeth Craven's sixth child, and second son. Born in December 1776, he was always known as Berkeley, a name chosen in honour of his mother's family.  He is to be seen aged three in this Berkeley-Granard group portrait at Berkeley Castle, where he is the merry little boy being carried on his mother's back. This image of him as a fun-loving imp matches everything we know about him throughout most of his life. A high-spirited, pleasure-loving sportsman and tearaway, he was daring, and perhaps a little inclined to show off.      Berkeley was sent to Eton and grew up to be tall and extremely handsome, the m ost robust of his brothers. He was fifteen when his father died. When he left school, his mother wanted to send him to university but her brother Frederick, who had been appointed one of his guardians by Lord Craven, refused. [1] So i n 1794, aged only 17, young Berk...

I have long intended to read Stephanie Barron's series of detective novels in which she turns Jane Austen into a sleuth. It is not such a far-fetched idea, because Austen's Emma  is a sort of detective story, and in it Austen reveals many of the powers of observation, and the knowledge of psychology, needed for constructing a good mystery. The plot twists as people find out secrets they never suspected. Agatha Christie of course created Miss Marple, a detective who defies people's expectation that a middle-aged, middle-class, nicely-mannered spinster cannot also be a clever and sharp-witted detective. So there is nothing too incredible about presenting a fictional Jane Austen as a solver of mysteries. Although Stephanie Barron has in fact written no less than fourteen books in the Jane Austen Mysteries series, it was not until I was lucky enough to win a copy of  Jane and the Year Without A Summer in a giveaway competition that I finally got round to reading one. The Year W...