"Jane and the Year Without A Summer" by Stephanie Barron
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 Without a Summer was 1816, the year before Austen's death. The weather across Europe was spectacularly bad owing to the eruption of a volcano in the Far East, that sent dust and debris into the atmosphere globally. The result was calamitous crop failure and a food shortage just when people were hoping to end the privations of the Napoleonic War period.
The novel is very thoroughly researched, and set during the May and June of 1816, when Jane Austen and her sister spent two weeks at Cheltenham Spa, in the hope of improving her declining health. Here they meet a range of colourful characters and Jane's wits are put to the test when a series of mysterious events arise, including poisoning of animals and then of people. Who is the real villain? No spoilers.
If it seems unlikely that Jane and Cassandra would have attended a fancy-dress ball, the introduction of a character who works at the local theatre and can obligingly lend exotic costumes solves that problem nicely.
Jane is no longer young - she is now aged forty, but we are allowed to imagine that she still has an admirer, and he is a man in every way worthy of her, intelligent, impeccable in his manners and principles, and handsome enough to make her heart beat again as if she were still twenty. The whole story is ingenious, well-constructed and entertaining, with plenty of comedy as well as period atmosphere.
Stephanie Barron writes very convincingly in the idiom of the Regency, and I would say that in this respect she is far better than Georgette Heyer. It is her modern English that seems to display many oddities, some of which are perhaps Americanisms and others typographical errors because what I got was a proof copy. I am not going to list them, as that would be boring, but I wonder if a predictive text mechanism was responsible for writing "Here, here" instead of "Hear, hear".
I am going to take issue with two little details. One is that the novel presents a pair of rather dislikeable Evangelicals, the Rev. Garthwaite and his sister, who are self-righteous and excessively deferential to the aristocracy. Actually Jane Austen herself leant very much to the Evangelical side in religion. She once wrote "I am not sure that we ought not all to be Evangelicals", and it was the Evangelicals who were leading the anti-slavery movement. Politically they were critical of the establishment. It was Anglicans such as Mr Collins who were deferential to the aristocracy, because their patronage was essential for getting a clergyman's job. Methodists and other reformed groups paid their own preachers.
Secondly, quite early in the book there is a reference to how the engagement of Jane Austen's sister Cassandra ended in grief because her fiancé, Tom Fowle, died of yellow fever in the West Indies. We are told that he "sailed off as chaplain to his patron, Lord Craven, on that nobleman's hare-brained expedition to the West Indies", never to return. [p.63]
While it is true that Tom died of yellow fever, it is not fair to blame Lord Craven or call his expedition to the West Indies "harebrained".
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| William, 7th Baron Craven, later Earl of Craven |
In 1795 William, seventh Baron Craven, the eldest son of the writer Elizabeth Craven, was sent to the West Indies to command a regiment during the Napoleonic Wars, as part of Britain's military defence of its colonies against the French. Craven spent a lot of his own money in setting up the regiment as his contribution to the war effort.
Tom Fowle, a distant cousin of the Cravens, had taken holy orders and was waiting for a vicar's post. He had been promised one by Lord Craven, but would have to wait until one of the present incumbents died, and until then he could not afford to marry because he had no home of his own and no income. So Craven offered him the chaplain's post, a paid position that was at his disposal immediately.
Tom was simply unlucky in contracting an infection on the return journey in 1797 and dying from the fever. It was nobody's fault, and Craven later said that if he had known that Tom was engaged to be married, he would not have taken him on the expedition. Craven, who had been considered to have a delicate constitution himself throughout childhood and youth, undoubtedly took all the same risks and believed that he had a duty to do so in the service of his country. Noblesse oblige.
Therefore while the expedition was undoubtedly dangerous and difficult it cannot be described as "hare-brained", unless we regard the whole of the Napoleonic Wars as hare-brained.
In 1801 when Lord Craven was staying at Ashdown House, one of his properties in Berkshire, with a young mistress, Harriette Wilson, Jane Austen commented sarcastically on his morals - "the little flaw of having a mistress living with him". It seemed very unfair that he could live openly with a mistress, yet Cassandra and Tom did not have the means to embark on lawful matrimony.
William, Lord Craven has been much maligned but he was really not one of the wildest rakes or wickedest earls of the Regency period, not by a very long chalk. He eventually settled down and became a model husband and father. His uncle Frederick, Earl of Berkeley, was far worse. Incidentally, Lord Craven married an actress who was a Jane Austen fan and wrote to her complimenting one of her books.
I suspect that Jane Austen harboured a lingering grudge towards Lord Craven and her prejudice against him was understandable. In her mind, William, seventh Lord Craven, was "the man who has been the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a most beloved sister". I wonder if, when Austen gave those angry words to Elizabeth Bennet, somewhere at the back of her mind she was thinking of William, Lord Craven.
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| Cheltenham Spa in Jane Austen's time. |
I am not going to find any more "little flaws" in Stephanie Barron's novel because she has undertaken something rather ambitious, and succeeded better than anyone else is likely to do. I look forward to reading more books of the series.
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Lt. Col. William, Baron Craven
Born 1770; Major in 84th Foot 28 February 1794; Lieutenant-Colonel in 84th Foot 31 May 1794; exchanged to 3rd Foot 25 September 1794; transferred to 40th Foot 1 September 1799; subsequently a Major-General; Earl of Craven 1801; died 1825.
https://www.napoleon-series.org/military-info/organization/Britain/Infantry/Regiments/c_3rdFoot.html
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