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Thanks!

Stephanie

For the Needlewoman: An Image of Jane

One of the more enjoyable aspects (or the most vexed, depending upon circumstances) of publishing a novel is the serendipitous nature of cover art.  Authors are rarely consulted about the images that grace their books; nor, quite often, does the Editorial side of a publishing house have a great deal of input.  Cover art is produced by the Art department, and in the heady days of publishing, when houses were flush with funds (the 1990s), images were often commissioned from artists.

Now they seem to be mostly produced by computers, and instead of images, often feature merely words.

My favorite cover in the Jane Austen Mystery Series is, hands-down, Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House.  It depicts a windswept Austen standing upon the quay at Southampton with some Royal Navy ships in the background, beneath a stormy sky. Fabulous.

The scene was painted by Kinuko Craft (www.kycraft.com), and the cover produced from her art.

Others appear to like this image of Jane just as much.  I learned today that it's even available in a cross stitch pattern.

So for the masterful needlewomen among you--a challenging winter project!  The chart may be found at:   

http://heavenandearthdesigns.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=160_134&products_id=2483

Enjoy!

Stephanie

Austenland

I am so happy in my friends, as to count several Janeites among them; and it was one of these who  charitably conveyed me to an advance screening of the film Austenland last evening.  We were conscious of appearing well, of being surrounded by a numerous acquaintance, and of living in every expectation of present enjoyment, and future satisfaction; so much so, that the term guilty pleasure only thrice passed our lips.

Seriously.  We had a great time. 

Yes, the movie has received only 3 out of 10 tomatoes on Rotten Tomatoes; it has been girlishly and gigglingly reviewed on NPR, panned outright by the New York Times--but if you've ever signed up enthusiastically for a Jane Austen Society Annual General Meeting, specifically for the hat-trimming, dance-training, or dressmaking breakout sessions; or if you're one of the founding members of the official Colin Firth online fanclub, Austenland is not a bad way to pass a couple of hours.

Make no mistake:  This is not a Heritage Adapation of one of the Divine Jane's Sacred Works.  We all have our favorites among those perennial staples of BBC funding, and Austenland will never be in the running for the most passionate arguments true Janeites know: Henry Tilney or John Knightley?  Frederick Wentworth or Fitzwilliam Darcy?  Colin Firth, or any other actor who attempts to fill his...um...?

What Austenland does explore is the unfortunate gap between fantasy and reality, between the desire to enter the pages of Pride and Prejudice, and the actual tedium of finding oneself eternally in a role that has no foundation in emotion or personal history.  It follows a young woman, Jane Hayes (the ingenuous and charming Carrie Russell) as she spends her life savings to return to Regency England on a great estate tricked out with period actors, intentionally conspiring to provide a romantic episode for her life.  Yes, there are slapstick moments--several of her colleagues deliberately lampoon the conventions of Regency dramas--and some of the humor is broad.  Austenland is a spoof on terminal fandom, and some of us may have suffered the malady enough to find it amusing or painful. But at base, the film offers a glimpse of a woman discovering that fakes--even beautifully clothed in an idyllic landscape--are no substitute for the real thing.  And that is a journey most of us will recognize.

As an author myself, I abhor spoilers.  Without disclosing the ending, therefore, I will say only that I found it a clever inversion of both the film's concept, and the expectation of most Janeites.  Guilty pleasure?  Why not.  It won't kill you.  It might even make you laugh.  Go see Austenland.

Stephanie

Edward's Dilemma: Part III

Lucy's Steele's Sense--and Jane Austen's Sensibility

Wednesday, 24^th April, 1811

No. 64 Sloane Street, London

The mail coach was incommodious and distressingly full; she was quite crushed against Anne, her ugly ill-favoured and elderly sister, as the poorly-sprung equipage lurched over the ruts in an attempt to gain Exeter; but such misfortunes must be immaterial to Miss Lucy Steele, in her eagerness to attack her zealous regard for duty.  Intelligence of the Miss Dashwoods’ removal from Norland to the environs of Barton Park having lately reached her ears, by the extraordinary good luck simple expedient of Mr. Edward Ferrars’  most recent letter missive—alarmingly replete with phrases of unconcealed admiration for the eldest Miss Dashwood—she was determined to scrape an acquaintance with such appalling delightful young ladies by any means possible.  A moment only was required, to seize upon consider of her relation Mrs. Jennings, an intimate of the Park—and so desirous, too, of being of use, to every young lady of passable merit!  To use, Lucy Steele should certainly put her; for Lucy detected a danger in Mr. Ferrars’ flowing periods of praise; and having endured with agonies admirable patience the spectre of his formidable mother’s nastiness displeasure these four years at least, she was most unwilling to allow any harpy to sink her claws give pride of place to a girl who could claim a mere cottage as domicile, and so paltry a sum as a third-share of three thousand pounds, as inducement to marriage.

“Jane!”

I started, and set down my pen.  

My sister Eliza stood in the bedchamber doorway, almost entirely obscured by a quantity of linen freshly supplied by her housekeeper, Madame Bigeon—who is so burdened in years, that she may no longer ascend the stairs without grasping the handrail, rendering such tasks as the disposition of linen, entirely beyond her powers.

“Only say that you are not writing, dear one!”

The expression of horror suffusing Eliza’s countenance might well have been ridiculous, did not a healthy respect for pounds and pence inspire it.  I glanced away, conscious of the debt I owed my brother—who has franked the publication of my dearest child, my romantickal romp of Elinor and Marianne, my cautionary fable of gentlemen’s wiles—my Sense and Sensibility.  I am come to London in the spring of 1811 on purpose to proof Mr. Thomas Egerton’s type-set pages—and having seen my plaintive words in print, cannot restrain myself from constantly amending them.

“It is only a very little writing,” I offered hurriedly.  “A scene, perhaps, to elucidate the terms under which poor Edward committed his lamentable folly, of engaging the affections of Miss Lucy Steele.”

“Conniving little beast,” Eliza replied dispassionately.  “She ought to be whipped.  Perhaps Colonel Brandon might supply the office.  But Jane, you are aware that Mr. Egerton has expressly forbidden you to change another word, without you incur the severest charges on Henry’s purse!  Dearest, do not say that you have struck out the type!”

I had.  The evidence was visible to every eye, in my firm blue scrawl.  I did the only thing possible—I seized the laundress’s bill from Eliza’s grasp.

“The charges on linen are extortionate in London,” I mourned.  “We cannot contrive to spend a quarter of this sum in Chawton village.” 

“--Which is why I am forever bringing my own sheets, dearest, when I chuse to visit your mother.”

I slipped the laundress’s bill over my errant pages, but not swiftly enough for Eliza’s eagle eye.  In high dudgeon, she deposited her pile of linen on my writing table.

“How am I to tell Henry that you have altered the text again?  He shall be wild with disapproval!”

“Henry is never wild.”

“That is an utter falsehood, Jane.  He is by far the most whimsical and intemperate of your brothers.  He should never have granted the Prince a loan, else--for you know we cannot hope to see a farthing of that silver back again; it is all gone in gambling and waistcoats.  And I have set my heart on the most charming jockey bonnet of leghorn straw, with eglantine ribbons-- and it must be impossible if you are to break Henry’s bank with paying Mr. Egerton for fresh type!”

“Eliza,” I said with remorse, “I assure you that I shall endeavour to mend my vicious habits.  Not a penny more shall Mr. Egerton have, to repair my misshapen prose; and you may have a score of jockey bonnets…provided I may save Edward from Lucy Steele’s toils.”

“I am excessively tired of Edward,” Eliza declared.  “He lacks all charm, address, and common sense, too—for how else should such a man be taken in by a vulgar chit with the name of Lucy?  I am out of all patience with him and his love.  Let Willoughby seduce Miss Steele--and there is an end to it!”

All speech was suspended by the appearance of Manon, Eliza’s personal maid; she frowned her disapproval, for Eliza’s hair had not yet been dressed and she was looking most unwell, from the effects of a persistent cold and exasperation with my spendthrift ways.  Manon seized the clean linen, and with a muttered imprecation of disapproval, departed for Eliza’s bedchamber.

“Willoughby cannot always be seducing everybody,” I retorted crossly. 
 “You know so little of the World, Jane.”

“Surely you must apprehend that Edward’s actions are...entirely honourable,” I attempted.  “That he must pursue the only course of action open to a gentleman, and pursue it in stoical silence.  That every reader of sense must admire his steadfast scruples, and his breaking heart--”

“—But every reader of sensibility would wish him to throw Lucy Steele in the Serpentine, and clutch Elinor to his bosom!”  Eliza threw up her hands.  “It is as I declared—you know so little of the World!”

“Hence the altered text,” I said flatly.  “It is intended to provide some verisimilitude to Edward’s motives.  A greater appreciation of his sorry dilemma.”

“His sorry backbone, you would mean,” Eliza muttered.  “Very well—let me see what you have set down.”

I turned to my writing table.

But the type-set pages were gone.

“Manon,” Eliza whispered.   Her countenance was all apprehension.

I moved swiftly to the door, to be met by the French maid.

“You have need of me, mademoiselle?”

“Of the pages you secured,” I said, “on the writing table.  They were obscured by the linen.”

“Ah,” she said wisely.  “The laundress’s bill.  But madame is never to be oppressed by such trifles.  They make her ill.  She is forever thinking of all the bonnets she could buy, did she content herself with soiled sheets.  It is as well to cast such things on the fire.”

“And that is what you have done,” I observed.

“Mais, oui, mademoiselle--What else would you?  She is not to be oppressed, madame.  On the fire it goes. ”

She made her curtsey and moved away along the passage, serene in the happy performance of duty. 

“Poor Jane,” Eliza murmured.  Already she had an idea of her leghorn straw, and how becomingly she should appear in it.

“Poor Edward,” I replied.  “Yet another scene lost.” 

And returned to my lamentable prose.

*   *   *

I hope you enjoyed Part Three of Austenesque Extravaganza's Touring Thursday!  Readers familiar with my Jane Austen Mysteries probably found themselves on familiar ground in the fantasia printed above--from the timing, Jane was in the thick of events recounted in Jane and the Barque of Frailty, not to mention her Sense and Sensibility page proofs from Mr. Egerton.

If you've missed the earlier parts of this "lost scene," by all means stop by these talented authors' websites:

Part One - Edward Visits Barton Cottage - Susan Mason-Milks

Part Two - Flashback! Edward and Lucy Reach an Understanding - Amanda Grange

Thanks for reading!

Stephanie

And Suddenly, Autumn

I opened the French doors to the terrace this morning and a wave of cold air gusted in off the lawn.
That suddenly, it's September in Colorado.
Naturally, the temperature will climb into the 90s in a few hours, but as the dogs step tentatively into the seven a.m. dew, it's all of 55, and the promise of snow and woodsmoke are on the air.

I spent most of the summer traveling and talking about my latest Francine Mathews spy novel, JACK 1939, a World War II-era adventure featuring Jack Kennedy as a 22 year-old Harvard junior researching his senior thesis all over Europe--while Hitler mobilizes to invade Poland.  It was quite a shift from discussing all things Austen, but with the change of seasons I'm thinking like a Barron again.


At the moment, I'm putting the finishing touches on my segment of a lost vignette from one of Austen's novels--as imagined by Susan Mason-Milks, Amanda Grange, and me, in that order--which will be up on the website here in a week's time (check back Thursday, September 13th, for our contribution to the AUSTENESQUE EXTRAVAGANZA--something we're calling "Edward's Dilemma.")  Susan kicks it off on her website; Mandy follows with the all-too-vital middle; and I attempt to match their greatness with the final few paragraphs.  I hope you'll enjoy.

And then: what next?

The original publisher of the Jane Austen Mysteries appears unenthused with continuing the series.  It's possible Jane will find a new home; but at the moment, I'm researching something I've tentatively titled THE WATERLOO ARCHIVE.  The bicentenary of the Great Battle in 2015 fast approaches, and I want to be there with a story.  It's a great excuse to refresh my understanding of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, Wellington's life, the nature of the Prussian army.  All good subjects as the weather turns cool, and I stack the wood by the library fire.

Happy Autumn!

Stephanie

Reading For a Too-Sudden Spring: The Enchanted April

It's May as I write this, and the dust of this drought-stricken state is already rising in little puffs about my feet as I walk my dog along the parched canal.  When breaking out the shorts and the sunblock, it seems wise to cherish what has already been: The most beautiful April in recent memory.  Everything came into flower at once at my house--the crab apple trees shown in the picture at left, the plum trees out back, the lilac and the tiny white stars of red-twig dogwood.  Unusually for Colorado, no sudden fall of snow struck spring dumb.  The kindness of the season has an ominous undertone--we all know that it's not normal, but as my younger son observed just last night, "It's hard to view sunny days as a natural disaster."  His tone seemed to imply that if anybody could do so, however, it would be his mother.

He reminded me, in those few words, of a character straight out of Elizabeth Von Arnim.  Just so did she  skewer her most lovable people--with a comment that revealed far too much of their souls.

She's an author most people no longer recognize, although some would recall the 1992 movie made from her best-known book, The Enchanted April.  I sat through it in a dream of sun-kissed scent, but I'm not going to talk about the movie here--the book is so much more rewarding in its acute celebration of human foibles, human hope, and the terribly human need to be loved.  The time is the early 1920s; the subject is the dreariness of post-war England and the compulsion to escape; and the alternative is a remote and lovely castle on the Italian coast.  Von Arnim sends four women of varying ages and degrees of personal desperation there for a month.  Having got them under her writer's eye, she turns each of them inside-out, with a delicacy and finesse unequaled since Jane Austen.

If summer arrived too soon in your town, too, this year--try The Enchanted April.  Short of buying a ticket on impulse for Portofino, it's the most delicious escape I know.

Stephanie

Friday's Child: The REACH Literacy Conference

So as my sons head off for their final exams this week, I'm thinking about the teachers I'll be talking to on Friday at the 2012 REACH Literacy Conference here in Denver.  The conference is intended for "educators, administrators, parents, middle and high school students, and literacy advocates who want to explore and understand the value of early reading readiness; embrace culturally relevant literature; and gain knowledge, insight and access to useful curriculum resources to create a richer learning experience."  It's being held over two days--May 31 and June 1--at the Kenneth King Academics & Performing Arts Center, on the Auraria Campus.

I'm a bit terrified.  I'm not a trained teacher.  I write novels for adults, not kids.  I know next to nothing about the challenges of literacy in the United States.  All I can do, therefore, is talk about how writers become writers--by starting life as readers.  We're all the sum of our stories, both the ones we read as kids and the ones we write every day.  And we're the end result of a lifetime of teachers, too--both bad and good.  I watch my own boys grow, and know how critical stories are in their lives.  Stories are maps discarded on the road by those who've walked ahead, clues to the terrain, routes for navigating existence.  We'd be lost without them.

Think of me Friday morning.  Introduce yourself, if you're there.  We'll swap a few tales.

Stephanie

My Personal Note From Charles (Dickens, that is)

Yesterday, as various folks around the world gave a nod to the creator of Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Little Nell--who presumably celebrated his 200th birthday with a glass of Port on some convenient celestial perch--I paused a moment in my guest room to offer Many Happy Returns to Charles Dickens myself.

Framed on the wall is one of the man's letters.  It wasn't written to me, of course--but I shamelessly read it anyway.  It's a small note written on blue-gray paper, with its original envelope, addressed and sealed with Dickens's wax, the color of dried blood.

The framer, sadly, couldn't show both sides of the envelope at once, so the wax seal is hidden from view, a treasure for some future generation to find when they reframe the thing in 2312.  The visible side is some compensation--Dickens signed the envelope as well as the note, and there's a great old penny postage stamp with Queen Victoria pretending to be Caesar's wife in the upper corner.  The ink is faded to a sepia brown.




Here's what the letter says:


Devonshire Terrace
Thirtieth November 1842
My Dear Count D'Orsay


We shall all three be delighted to dine at Gore House on Friday; and, (as you do not mention the hour) we shall take it for granted that you dine at Half past Seven, unless we hear to the contrary.


Always believe me 
faithfully yours
Charles Dickens


He scrawled his signature emphatically across the bottom of the page, and underscored it with a scrolling motion at least ten times.  And yes, that's a comma you see before the parenthesis.  Perhaps our habit of placing it after is hopelessly twenty-first century.  


It's a commonplace note enough.  The Comte D'Orsay was a flamboyant figure in Dickens's day, an artist, a dandy, a wealthy man who loved to entertain.  But who are "we three?"  And what exactly did they dine on?  Did D'Orsay keep the note for decades, or did his valet pilfer it?  And how did it end up in my mother's closet, a hundred and fifty years later?  The devil of it is, nobody in my family really knows.  It's our own little Mystery of Edwin Drood.


There's an import duty receipt for one hundred and forty-five pounds from a dealer named Maggs Brothers, located at 50, Berkeley Square, London, to a dealer in Bethesda, Maryland, dated 1977.  We lived in Potomac at the time; and that was the year my father died.  The story of how he came by Dickens's careless acceptance of a dinner invitation, died with him.  It was only in the last years of my mother's life that the letter was discovered at all--and my sisters kindly passed it on to me.  They figured that as a writer, I'd cherish it.


I do.  I thought about hanging it opposite my desk, where I can see it every day; and maybe at some point I will.  For now, though, it hangs in the guest room, so that anybody transiting through Denver can glance at that sprawling, flamboyant, dramatic fist--and hear an entire world of fantastic characters whispering from the faded ink.


Happy birthday, Charles.


Stephanie

A Toast to January's Quiet

It has been snowing in Colorado, and I'm off tomorrow to ski over the long weekend.  January--a month so many view as bleak and cheerless--is one of my favorite months in the year.  The hustle of the holidays is over; no huge obligations loom; and it's time to hunker down by the fire with good books and snoozing dogs.   I've been dutifully reading Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, and finding it disappointing, perhaps because I lived through college in the '80s and my memories of it are much better than his characters'.  (It was brought home to me recently just how long ago that was when a chance acquaintance commented: "You look really good for somebody who graduated in 1985."  We call that a backhanded comment, folks: Nice to know you look OK, given that you've got one foot in the grave.)  So last night I put down the Plot and picked up a Golden Age mystery.  And naturally, I mixed up a Sidecar to drink with it.

The Sidecar surfaces in Agatha Christie novels and only rarely in trendy bars these days.  It takes its name from the little passenger capsule so many motorcycles sported in England in the 1930s, the kind that Lady Mary Wimsey and her pet Communist meant to elope in, during the first chapters of  Dorothy Sayers' Clouds of Witness.  It's a brandy cocktail, which nobody drinks anymore, but it's absolutely delicious.  Here, after much experimentation, is how to make one:

The Wimsey Sidecar

1.5 oz Courvoisier
3/4 oz Grand Marnier
3/4 oz Cointreau
3/4 oz fresh lemon juice

Shake all in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and pour into a martini glass--preferably one whose rim has been wiped with a lemon and coated with sugar.  Grab a good dog and a good mystery and settle in while the blizzards howl.

After you drink this, you'll want to be poured into one of those cute little passenger capsules and elope.

Happy New Year from Nessa and Mycroft

Stephanie

Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron: A Fatal Charm

The tenth Jane Austen Mystery, Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron, throws together two of history's literary greats--and the two who seem least likely to have met.  Yes, they were contemporaries; but Jane was "retiring" and George Gordon, Lord Byron, outrageous.  No doubt their conversations, had they encountered one another, must have been compelling.  But would the occasion ever have arisen?

I began to wonder about six degrees of separation in Jane Austen's world when I was researching and writing a very different book, A Flaw in the Blood, which is set in 1864 and concerns Queen Victoria.  In the course of learning about her world, I naturally read David Cecil's excellent biography Melbourne.  Victoria's first prime minister--already aging when she ascended the throne, but a Regency Buck of the First Stare, a remarkable personality and intellect--utterly bewitched the young queen, whose partiality for William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, was so marked that raucous crowds heckled her with cries of "Mrs. Melbourne!" when she rode abroad in Rotten Row.  She was perhaps 18 when this "grand pash" occurred, and not yet married to Albert; and she seems not to have cared one whit for public opinion.  I'd have swooned over Melbourne, too.

Caro dressed as a page

The real Mrs. Melbourne, of course, was long since dead; but Lady Caroline Lamb's storied reputation lived on long after her time.  The author of Glenarvon, she was most famous for her brief affair with Lord Byron, which ended in public scandal because she refused to give up her obsession--becoming possibly the first recorded Celebrity Stalker.  Regency fans will always be fascinated by Caro Lamb--she was a Ponsonby by birth, the daughter of the unfortunate Countess of Bessborough, who was a victim of domestic violence, a friend of Sheridan and Charles James Fox, and sister of that Georgian Incomparable, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.  Caroline Ponsonby grew up in the hectic atmosphere of her aunt Georgiana's Devonshire House and Chatsworth.  Ironically, Byron would eventually marry Caro's cousin, Annabella--his sole disastrous foray into marriage.

Researching Melbourne, reading about Caro, and thinking about Regency personalities inevitably led me to a biography of Byron himself.  Naturally, it's littered with love affairs and remarkable women, none of whom--not even his half-sister, with whom he had an incestuous child--appears to have been able to resist him.  A gallery of some of them may be viewed below.

Annabella, Lady Byron, mother of Byron's
legitimate daughter

Augusta Leigh, Byron's half-sister,
mother of an incestuous daughter

Jane Elizabeth, Lady Oxford

Claire Claremont, Mary Shelley's step-sister,
mother of an illegitimate daughter

A single fact at the end of Byron's life gave me pause: he was refused a public funeral or burial in Westminster Abbey in 1824 due to his scandalous life.  Instead, his biographer tells us, he was laid out for viewing at the London home of  Sir Edward Knatchbull.  Yes, Janeites--Byron's wake was held in Fanny Austen Knight Knatchbull's London house.  How did George Gordon end up in with Jane Austen's niece?  I have never been able to find out.  But the link between the two families was all the permission I needed.  I decided Jane MUST encounter some madness in Brighton in 1813.

One more interesting degree of separation: Byron was always in Dun Territory--always at the mercy of his creditors--and when he finally sold his birthright, a crumbling estate called Newstead Abbey, he sold it to the brother of Fanny Austen Knight's Kentish neighbor, James Wildman, of Chilham Castle.  (For more about the Wildman family, see Jane and the Canterbury Tale.)

Happy Winter Reading!


Stephanie

Past Master: Appreciating Margery Allingham

It has been uncharacteristically cold, gray, and snowy here in Denver.  I took a break from twining greens around the house this weekend to curl up on the couch with an icon of Golden Age Detective Fiction--Margery Allingham.

And found myself wondering, as I always do, why she is so rarely read anymore.

Allingham created her amateur British detective, Albert Campion, at the end of the 1920s, as one of those plausible, aristocratic, deceptively foolish young men who look decorative at weekend houseparties and have a knack for solving murders.  Campion reads like a dangerous foil to Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey--his background is deliberately vague, possibly criminal, and his aristocratic family seems to have cast him off.  His valet Lugg--unlike Wimsey's Bunter--is an ex-con.  It's a calculated inversion of a detective fiction trope; and this sinister bent becomes more pronounced as Allingham's writing career evolved and deepened.  I could talk about the excellent classic fiction Allingham turned out in the Thirties--The Fashion in Shrouds, Dancers in Mourning, Black Plumes--but I won't. It's her later fiction that brings me to my knees.

By the 1950s, Allingham abandoned amateur detection for the police procedural, introducing a series of related characters affiliated with Scotland Yard, who call upon the middle-aged Campion as a sort of eminence grise of crime.  More importantly, in such novels as The Tiger in the Smoke and Tether's End, Allingham abandons completely the mystery novel architecture--in favor of a thriller's arc.  She infiltrates the minds of her killers, carrying the reader along with her, in a deft examination of amorality, luck, calculated and cold-blooded murder, and the happy element of chance that unravels a sociopath's world.  She is masterful at inspiring dread, so that even when you've put down the book her characters whisper quietly in the back of your mind and surface at night in your dreams.  Her treatment of trust and its violation, her exploration of the charm of plausible con men and the innocents who care about them, and the final desperation of her trapped criminals, are timeless; her books retain a depth and power entirely due to their complex characterizations.

Allingham's not available in digital format yet, and this neglect--similarly visited upon another Golden Age great, Ngaio Marsh--is a gap in the market SOMEBODY should exploit.  In the meantime, comb your remaining sources of secondhand mystery fiction and snap up the yellowed paperbacks with the deceptively silly covers.  There are forgotten marvels waiting--perfect for a snowy weekend in December.

For a comprehensive wallow in all things Allingham, check out the official website of the Margery Allingham Society.

Stephanie

Channeling Harriette in Barque of Frailty

Alright, I admit it: there's something of the bodice-ripper in the cover of this particular Jane Austen Mystery--but I love it all the same.  The extraordinary quality of light and movement, the combination of pearl and gold, and the Pauline de Borghese-like quality of the murdered woman's limbs--it all works for a book about sex, blackmail, and power.  And what does any of that have to do with Jane Austen, you ask?

Everything, my friends.

Thinking of Our Jane as a prudish spinster writing in peaceful retirement has always been something of a mistake.  In April, 1811, when Jane and the Barque of Frailty begins, the London Season is in full swing--and Jane Austen is paying an extended visit to her banker-brother Henry and glamorous sister-in-law, Eliza, Comtesse de Feuillide.  Jane is in London to proof the first typeset pages of Sense and Sensibility, publication of which Henry and Eliza have generously underwritten.  Impossible, however, for Jane to escape intrigue--given the nature of the Sloane Street neighborhood the Henry Austens inhabit, and the wildly variable nature of their social acquaintance.  Nearby in Hans Crescent, actress Dolly Jordan--the comic genius of her age, the Duke of Clarence's deserted mistress and mother of his ten children--has set up housekeeping; Lord Moira, one of Henry's banking clients and a member of the dangerous Carlton House Set, is enamored of Eliza; and among their friends are the French emigre Comte d'Entraigues and his opera-singer wife--whose curious political activities would destroy them the following year.  Jane refers to all of these people in her letters from London, and describes the whirl of activity she experienced during the Season, with drollery and satisfaction.  She might have been laboring over her page proofs, but she was also having a darn good time.

The year 1811 was pivotal in British history, ushering in the Prince Regent's nine years of caretaker monarchy and the exit in a straitjacket of his father, George III.  The protracted war in the Peninsula was ending in victory for England, and politicians were squaring off to support or oppose the new Regent.  Against this backdrop of political change London pursued its dissipations with abandon--chief among them, the patronage of powerful men for a class of women known variously as lightskirts, fair Cyprians, the Muslin Company, or Barques of Frailty: courtesans of the demimonde offered carte blanche--full funding--in exchange for their favors.

Jane had long been aware of the proclivity of powerful men for entertaining young women of easy virtue--she touches on the theme in Sense and Sensibility through the saga of Willoughby, a young buck on the Town blessed with handsome looks, charming manners, complete freedom and the prospect of future inheritance, who thinks nothing of seducing the ward of his acquaintance, Colonel Brandon, and abandoning her once she is with child.  In Mansfield Park, she gives the charming Crawfords a naval uncle who insists upon his mistress living with him--which drives his worldly and fashionable young niece out of his home.  As Jane knew, such affairs were not limited to Town life--she refers to the Fowle family's patron, Lord Craven, in a letter dated as early as 8 January 1801, as "having a Mistress now living with him at Ashdown Park...the only unpleasing circumstance about him." Lord Craven was the man responsible for sending Cassandra Austen's fiance, Tom Fowle, to the West Indies in 1792, where he died of yellow fever; in 1801, Craven was created 1st Earl Craven (second creation).  He was quite the dashing figure: a military man, an aide-de-camp to the King, Lord Lieutenant of Berkshire, and eventually the husband of a  famous actress, Louisa Brunton, after whom he named his yacht.  When Jane mentions him, he was about thirty-one years old; his Mistress, we now know, was fifteen--and detested Craven's "ugly white nightcap" as much as Marianne Dashwood deplored flannel.  She ran away from Ashdown Park and embarked upon a storied career preserved forever in one of the Great Reads of the Regency Period: Harriette Wilson's Memoirs.

"The debauched coterie": A depiction of some of the famous members of the ton Wilson named in her Memoirs

Harriette was my guide through the demimondaine's world as I set out to write Barque of Frailty.  Never mind that she's a notoriously unreliable witness--she mailed copies of her manuscript to every client mentioned in its pages, offering to remove them for an exorbitant sum of money, which means the public figures she cheerfully pillories are the ones who stiffed her (no pun intended).  However vicious her portrait of the Duke of Wellington, for example--who famously told her to "publish and be damned!"--her depiction of courtesan life is vivid, entertaining, revelatory, and unsparing.  She was a smart woman living by her wits without much sentimentality, determined to present herself and her friends as victims of Tragic Love.  She made money hand over fist, and was as famous when she ventured into Hyde Park as any of the Society ladies who offered her the Cut Direct.  After publishing her Memoirs, however, she seems to have found it expedient to quit London for the Continent.

Barque of Frailty closes with a scene Harriette would have recognized: The Cyprian's Ball at the Argyle Rooms.  I offer here Cruikshank's lampoon of the event, which was as famous among a certain set as anything Almack's Assembly could offer--and much more enthusiastically patronized.

Enjoy!


Stephanie

Jane Austen Made Me Do It

Just got my Author Copy of this new anthology of up-to-the-minute Austen-inspired stories (can I find anything else to hyphenate? Oh, yes: It's hot-off-the-press), edited by Austen Maven Laurel Ann Nattress.  The book doesn't officially launch until next Friday night in Ft. Worth, TX--in the warm penumbra of the Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America--but I'm exulting in the advance copy.  So many stories!!!  From so many fabulous pens!!!  Some are modern riffs on the JA world, others are continuations, meditations, improvisations on Jane and her work.  Yes, I have an entry--"Jane and the Gentleman Rogue," in which the much-lamented Lord Harold returns--but who wants to read her own stuff when she can read everybody else's?

For more on the book, check out Laurel Ann's website: www.janeaustenmademedoit.com.

I can't attend the JASNA conference itself this year, because I committed to a charity event in Golden, CO--Books & Brunch--on Saturday Oct. 15th; but I'll be in Ft. Worth Friday night, Oct. 14th, at the Jane Austen Made Me Do It book launch party!  If you're in the area, by all means come!  Lots of great JAMMDI authors will be there, along with Laurel Ann, to sign the anthology--and any other books we're simultaneously peddling.

October 14, 6:30-8:00 pm
Launch Party for Jane Austen Made Me Do It
Barnes & Noble Booksellers
Sundance Square
401 Commerce Street
Fort Worth, TX 76102
(817) 332-7178 

Looking forward--

Stephanie

Tea with Jane in Scottsdale

As the week winds to a close, I'm about to set off for The Poisoned Pen Bookstore in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona, where the lovely and talented Barbara Peters and her staff make bookselling look easy.  We're sitting down for a Jane Austen Tea at 2 p.m. this Saturday, September 17th.  I'm expecting a good conversation about all things Jane, and Canterbury Tale in particular. If you're planning to stop by, brings lots of questions--and be sure to read the previous post about Edward Austen-Knight's home, Godmersham Park, in Kent, where Canterbury Tale is set.

Looking forward to a cozy nosh with mystery fans!
Stephanie

Walking the Backroads of Kent: Jane and the Canterbury Tale

One of the particular pleasures of writing about Jane Austen is...the travel!  Oh, the travel!  After her father's retirement and death, Jane moved with depressing regularity in her twenties and thirties--several lodgings in Bath alone, followed by Southampton and eventually Chawton--and she made frequent side trips to visit relatives in Staffordshire (Edward Cooper and his family at  Hamstall-Ridware), Kent (brother Edward at Godmersham), and Warwickshire (a flying visit with strange bedfellows to Stoneleigh Abbey).  She often stayed with her brother Henry in his various London homes, and enjoyed summer visits to towns along the Channel Coast, such as Lyme Regis.  Scholars dispute whether she ever got as far north as Derbyshire--she mentions the town of Bakewell in Pride & Prejudice--but I for one believe that she did. 

And having elected, sometime in the closing years of the last century, to write about Jane myself--I had little choice but to follow where she led.  I have traipsed around the English countryside in the grip of obsession, hunting for the obvious and the obscure among the Monuments to Jane.  I've lost myself in hedgerows searching for Edward Cooper's parsonage, slept in a canopied bed in a Palladian villa outside of Bath, and traced the remnants of a Humphrey Repton garden; but some of my loveliest memories are of Godmersham Park, Edward Austen Knight's estate about eight miles outside Canterbury, in Kent.  And I never even looked inside the house.

Godmersham in Jane and Edward's day

Edward, as most Janeites know, was considered the most fortunate of the six Austen sons, because he was adopted at the age of twelve by Thomas Knight, a childless but wealthy cousin.   Edward inherited Godmersham in Kent, along with Chawton Great House in Hampshire and some other landholdings; he was occasionally plagued with lawsuits disputing his right to inherit Thomas Knight's property, and he was required to take the Knight name--but in general, he settled with apparent happiness and few regrets into the life of a country gentleman. 

The Front Hall at Godmersham

His eleven children grew up in affluence, with public school educations and good hunting for the boys; the girls suffered a parade of governesses--Jane befriended some of these, like Anne Sharpe, and passed over others, like the Miss Clewes who figures in Canterbury Tale.   The Austen-Knights entertained everybody, and were entertained in return, in their neighborhood in Kent: the Wildmans at Chilham Castle, the Finch-Hattons at Eastwell Park, and their various Bridges cousins.  Godmersham was a large and handsome house, set into a fold of the hills, with the River Stour running between it and the road; from Jane's letters, written in October and November of 1813, it seems like a house constantly full of people.  The local MP and Master of Hounds, Mr. Lushington, arrives to dine and spend the night; Young Edward's friends drop in and out of the guest bedrooms prior to his departure for Oxford; the Moores arrive for a week and install their son in the nursery.  Jane herself spends two months at Godmersham that autumn, and is able to collect considerable material for the book she is thinking of writing--a book called Emma.  She revels in the comfort and society of the place, the opportunity for stimulation, and her drives into the walled cathedral town of Canterbury.  On one of those junkets, Edward--who is First Magistrate--takes her through the Canterbury Gaol at Westgate.

Years later, I walked through Canterbury myself, looking for the old gaol.  I bought some Regency fashion plates--I collect them--at a small bookseller's in one of the town's winding streets, then caught a bus that dropped me without ceremony at the end of Godmersham Park's long drive.

Sheep on the Godmersham Downs

At the time, the house was a corporate headquarters.  I was free to walk up the driveway, however, and traverse the grounds--all of which look remarkably as they must have done in Jane's day--because Godmersham sits on the ancient Pilgrim's Way, the footpath between London and Canterbury Cathedral.  The Pilgrim's Way is open to hikers, as are all public footpaths in England, regardless of whose property they cross.  For a while that sunny July morning I was able to pretend I was one of Chaucer's merry band of fellow-travellers, telling stories to pass the time.  And I could imagine Jane, spinning tales of her own, as she walked the high hills of Edward's estate, dotted with specimen trees and sheep.  I went on to set two books at Godmersham:  Jane and the Genius of the Place, which occurs during the summer of 1805, known as the Great Terror, when Kent was braced for Napoleon's expected invasion; and now the eleventh Austen mystery, Jane and the Canterbury Tale.  This story revisits the Austen-Knights eight years later, in 1813--when Elizabeth Austen is long since dead, her children growing up, and her husband Edward still mourning her.  It is very much a family story, about love and loss, and the endurance of such things through time.  It is also, by design, a story of fellow-travelers, and the adventurous tales they weave about the past, rather as Chaucer's Pilgrims did in that other Canterbury Tale.

It is possible this is the last Jane Austen mystery I will write.  I don't regret leaving my Jane here, where I first felt I truly found her--hurrying with her pen and small, handsewn book of paper toward the little temple set on a hill, to gaze out over Edward's paradise, and dream her particular dreams.  I hope you find your own Jane Austen in this Canterbury Tale, too.

Fondly,

Stephanie

Austenesque Extravaganza: An Interview With Lord Harold

Portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence.

Without question, the most beloved and intriguing gentleman in the entire Being a Jane Austen Mystery Series is Lord Harold Trowbridge, second son of the Fifth Duke of Wilborough: ardent Whig  and debonair clubman; unrepentant duellist and Man-about-Town; trusted confidant of the Crown and implacable enemy of Buonaparte--otherwise known as the Gentleman Rogue.  Lord Harold first made his appearance in Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor; having suffered an untimely demise in Jane and the Ghosts of Netley, he nonetheless reappears in a forthcoming short story, "Jane and the Gentleman Rogue," set in 1805 Bath, and presently to be published in Jane Austen Made Me Do It (Random House, October 2011, Laurel Ann Nattress, editor.)  The following is an informal interview with Lord Harold, conducted on the fly by The Author.


The Author:  How did you come to make such a mull of your affair with Jane?

Lord Harold: Good God!  You might spare a fellow a very little!  Do you not think I've been asking myself the same damned question--and for all eternity?  I am one of those who are fated, perhaps, only to apprehend the worth of a creature once she is past all reclaiming.  We exist, you know--in our own particular Hell.  She was an excellent woman, Jane--unmatched, indeed, in her time and sphere.  No beauty to speak of, mind--except, perhaps, for her very speaking eyes.  When they did not mourn, they laughed irrepressibly, at some inner voice of ridicule she alone heard, that subjected all humanity to its scorn--as no eyes I've ever seen, before or since, have laughed.  So must God Himself have roared, to witness our absurdity!  It was her wit I loved; I confess it unashamedly.  Lord Harold, enamored of a Bluestocking!  She ruined me for every other woman.

And her hair!  How I should have loved to have seen it unbound.  I itched to loose those pins, at times, in the close conference of my carriage, when we two were locked together in the swaying conveyance; an intimate and separate world, whose tragic dignity was preserved only by my restraint--the forbearance of a gentleman.  What is forbearance, after all, when its sole reward is the grave?  I might have run my fingers through those chestnut locks, and held her fast, within the span of what little time remained to me--

The Author: But you did not; and she died unwed--though perhaps not unloved.

Lord Harold:  Her works outlived her.  I predicted that much, you know--it was I who told her she must write, as I lay gasping from the effects of the knife-wound that despatched me.  She should never have achieved the greatness she did, had I once loosed that glorious hair, and taken her to wife; she should have become something quite else--Lady Harold, a formidable figure, tricked out by the most expensive modiste, which I dare swear she would have gloried in.  But her writing?  A thing for the fireside; for the amusement of children and indolent cousins, hanging on her sleeve.  No: She was better by far, left to Genius, than claimed by me. 

The Author:  You are eloquent in your own defense.

Lord Harold:  Naturally.  Eloquence is the most necessary weapon of a gentleman's arsenal; it disarms reproof, even as it wounds.  An art lost to your age--but one that defined mine.  Recollect: A gentleman is nothing without Honour; and what is honour stripped of eloquence?  A poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage--a Buonaparte, in fact, glorying in the sacrifice of better men.

The Author:  You devoted your life to defeating Napoleon.

Lord Harold: I see you call him by the name he chose, rather than the one to which he was born.  I was never one to pander to a shortened stature, puffed up by bravado--except when it was called Nelson.  For the Hero of Trafalgar, one must always make exception.

The Author: Hah!  You are an adept, I see, at turning the conversation.  But we are to talk of Jane--and so I must ask you, my lord, about the curious cask you bequeathed her.  A chest full of papers, kept safe by your solicitors, and bearing your entire history--not to mention the history of your generation.  A dangerous gift, was it not?  And one contested by the Trowbridge family?  Your brother the Sixth Duke was most incensed.  Such names as he called Miss Austen!   

Lord Harold:  My brother is a fool.  --Reason enough to have guarded my papers.  Wilborough should have burnt them--but Jane knew how to use them.

The Author: The very fact of the bequest argues that you anticipated your death.

Lord Harold: But of course.  We are all merely borrowers of Time.  It is a wise man who banks upon nonexistence.

 The Author:  But what of those who gain Immortality?

Lord Harold:  Such as Jane, you would mean?  Why else cultivate Genius?  I would not be sitting under your eye, my dear Authoress, were it not for my extraordinary discernment--in having seen in Miss Austen, what no one else of her circle recognised: that she possessed the animating flame, unique to herself and her age, that should prove imperishable.  I warmed myself at that flame while I lived; I was perhaps scorched by it; but it has kept the cold of the grave forever at bay for us both.  And what is the transitory state of a mere Lady Harold, after all, compared to that?

The Rogue is Sped: Jane and the Ghosts of Netley

It's not too much to say that I've received more mail--and more of it outraged--in response to Jane and the Ghosts of Netley than the rest of the series combined.  This has to do, of course, with the ending--which, if you haven't yet read the novel, I won't spoil for you.  I will only say that Lord Harold Trowbridge himself dictated it to me, and I had no choice but to write down what he said. 

This is a phenomenon most readers can't believe: that the characters we create live their own lives, well beyond our control, and are anything but subject to our authorial impulses.  The Gentleman Rogue has always gone his own way--and I was never one to bridle him.


The book is set in the autumn of 1808, in a ruined abbey that still sits across the Solent from Jane Austen's home in Southampton.  Netley Abbey was of Cistercian founding, long since destroyed; and we know from Jane's letters that she was in the habit of visiting it.  In this book, she discovers a nest of spies operating from the ruined abbey's height, which afforded an excellent view of the waterway. 

But of greater interest to me, perhaps, is the secondary tale that runs through the novel--of Maria Fitzherbert, the cast-off Catholic "wife" (as she certainly believed herself to be) of the Prince of Wales.  The twice-widowed Maria, prevented by her religion and commoner status from a sanctified marriage with the Prince, consented to marry him morganatically in 1786--ten years before he married his cousin, Princess Caroline of Brunswick, at his father George III's instigation.  Discarded in favor of other paramours as she aged, Maria Fitzherbert nonethless remained a friend of the Prince of Wales--and in all probability, the mother of his illegitimate offspring.  The notion of an heir to the throne, the product of an illegal Catholic marriage, was so socially explosive--and so politically volatile--that any such child would only survive in secrecy.  It is that story I explore in Ghosts of Netley.



If this novel stirs your interest in the history of Charles Carroll of Carrollton and his descendants, by all means pick up a copy of Sisters of Fortune, by Jehane Wake.  The story of the four beautiful Caton sisters--Charles Carroll's granddaughters--took Europe by storm in Jane Austen's day: painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, beloved of Wellington, and the epitome of convention-shattering American women.  If they knew Maria Fitzherbert's secret, they never breathed a word.

Enjoy!

Stephanie

A Fine Naval Fervour: Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House

One of the great indulgences in the life of an Austen fan is a trip designed to follow in her footsteps.  I've naturally had to travel in Austen country a number of times in order to research the various books in this detective series, but oddly enough, I never find the terrain tedious.  One of my favorites stops is Portsmouth--blasted nearly to oblivion in the second World War, but home nonetheless to a replica of Nelson's flagship, Victory, and the Royal Navy's fabulous maritime museum.  This is pure jam for anybody who cut her literary eyeteeth on C.S. Forestor's Horatio, or Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey--or anyone who finds Captain Frank Austen one of the more interesting of Jane's brothers.

Frank was on shore leave during the course of the sixth Jane Austen mystery, Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House, living with his young wife, Mary, his future wife, Martha, and the female members of his family in hired lodgings in Southampton, a short sail up the Solent from Portsmouth.  Although Southampton suffered terribly from German bombing runs on the docks, vestiges of the old walled city Jane knew can still be found--a sort of treasure hunt for any Austen fan with a copy of In the Footsteps of Jane Austen tucked into her purse.  There's Castle Square (although the house is gone) where Jane lived and the Dolphin Inn, with its bow window, where she danced at the Assembly despite her advancing spinsterhood.

I stayed at the Dolphin while I was in town--and although it has since been smartly renovated, the arched carriage entrance to the inner courtyard still gives a sense of  the coaching inn it must have been two hundred years ago.  One imagines all sorts of people hastening from London to take ship in Southampton, and stopping the night at the Dolphin; I would use it again in the next novel, Jane and the  Ghosts of Netley, when Lord Harold Trowbridge gave Jane a lesson in the use of his dueling pistols in the Dolphin's yard.

And of course, there is the Wool House still sitting as it has for seven hundred years facing the quay, a square, utilitarian, medieval building erected by Cistercian monks--the same ones who were housed at Netley Abbey across the Solent in the 14th century.  It was once a center of the English wool trade, most recently it housed Southampton's Maritime Museum, and is currently up for redevelopment by the town council--but in Jane's day, the Wool House served as a temporary prison for French seamen.  She must have passed it often as she walked briskly down the High and turned left, toward the little theatre where she enjoyed attending plays.

The French sailors kept in the Wool House would have been held only temporarily, awaiting exchange for English sailors taken in battle with the French.  The notion of exchange is a strange one for most of us moderns; we assume that once taken prisoner, a seaman would be sidelined for the duration of the war.  But in Jane's day, POW camps were unheard of.  Officers taken prisoner were often housed by their Enemy brethren, and treated with the respect demanded by rank, dining at table with their former combatants and attempting to converse in each other's language.  In a matter of days or weeks they returned cordially to the business of killing each other.  The process seems almost civilized, in retrospect--an honourable approach to the notion of warfare that probably ended decades later somewhere in the Crimea.

Standing in front of Wool House one July day, however, I felt a shiver as I imagined the men held within, and Jane walking by.  The Wool House's windows would have offered glimpses of unknown French faces, or snatches of French song drifting to the street.  Or perhaps a plea for aid, from a French prisoner to an unknown Enlishwoman, whose brother was a naval officer...

The cover of this particular novel is my favorite of all the Jane books.  It so perfectly captures the color of the sea, the sense of wind off the Solent, even the possibility of hope--as Jane gazes out at the horizon.  Enjoy!

Stephanie

Anatomising Jane: The Stillroom Maid

For any person with a knowledge of history, traveling in Derbyshire is an emotional venture.  It was here that an entire village quarantined itself, the inhabitants slowly dying of the plague, in an extraordinary act of communal stoicism that is creatively reimagined in Geraldine Brooks's novel, Year of Wonders.  In Derbyshire, too, is Thomas Banks's masterpiece, a marble statue of little Penelope Boothby, which draws countless visitors to Ashbourne Church.  The child died at the age of five in 1793, and the anguished inscription of her parents is profoundly moving:

She was in form and intellect most exquisite.  The unfortunate parents ventured their all on this frail Bark.  And the wreck was total.

Penelope rests on her side, cheek cradled by a pillow, her hands cupped beneath her chin; the very image of a sleeping child.  The statue is heartbreaking.  We're told people mourned their dead children less in past centuries, because mortality rates were so high; but this is clearly false comfort.  I carried the image of Penelope in my mind as I toured Derbyshire, and the death of children wound its way into the plot of The Stillroom Maid.

Derbyshire boasts the great estate of Chatsworth, of course--still haunted by the ghost of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and the extraordinary risks she took at the gaming tables and beyond; haunted, too, by the memory of Kick Kennedy, Jack's little sister, who married Devonshire's heir Billy Hartington in 1944, in the teeth of family outrage, only to have him killed by a German sniper five weeks later.  Kick died tragically young and is buried in the Devonshire plot at Edensour, a few miles from Chatsworth; but her puckish grin still blazes from the portrait gallery's walls. 

In a story that revolves around Lord Harold Trowbridge, second son of a duke and Rogue-About-Town, it was impossible not to use Chatsworth--it was a center of Whig politics in Jane Austen's day, and Lord Harold was nothing if not a Whig.  He would certainly have known the Incomparable Georgiana, who has recently died at the opening of this book.  From Lord Harold to Jane, dancing at Chatsworth, is but a step. 

Jane describes the little town of Bakewell, three miles from Chatsworth, in some critical chapters of Pride and Prejudice.  But as I mention in the introduction to Jane and the Stillroom Maid, most Austen scholars assume Jane never saw Derbyshire at all, because no letter exists dated from the county.  Some of us suspect otherwise.  She writes about the Peak District as she wrote about Lyme Regis in Persuasion, with the sort of contained passion for a place she loved.  As a writer myself, I find it categorically unlikely that she would choose to place Pemberley, much less the pivotal encounter between Darcy and Elizabeth, in a place she'd never seen.  d'Arcy was the family name of the Earls of Holderness, local to Derbyshire.

A wall placque in The Rutland Arms in Bakewell declares that Jane Austen stayed there during the summer of 1811, but that is unlikely--the family record has her elsewhere.  She might, however, have visited in 1806, while staying with her cousin Edward Cooper in neighboring Staffordshire.  During Jane's six-week visit to the parsonage at Hamstall Ridware, the numerous Cooper progeny contracted a virulent strain of whooping cough, and it seems plausible that Cousin Edward might suggest a side-trip for his guests to the beauties of Matlock and Dove Dale, while his children hacked away at home under the harassed attentions of his long-suffering wife.  The absurdities of Edward Cooper are one of the delights, for me, of this book.

Thus, the setting of The Stillroom Maid. 

Murder, however?  And maids?

The plot arose from various influences.  Chief among them was a portrait I saw in a country-house hotel outside of Bath.  I'd stayed at Ston Easton Park while researching The Genius of the Place--the beautiful Palladian-style house still boasted the remnants of a garden designed by Humphrey Repton, and the owners had one of Repton's famous Red Books, outlining his proposed changes, in their library.  In another room, however, hung a group portrait of the servants resident during Jane Austen's time.  Among them were the housekeeper--a truculent looking middle-aged woman in a white cap--the steward, a dark and wiry fellow with a determined jaw--and the stillroom maid.  Her hands were folded and her gaze was demure; but her gaze was suggestive.  She was young, and her features were delicate. She was flirting with the painter. 

I asked about the portrait--was it usual to commission a study of one's servants?

"There's a story about that," the Ston Easton staffer confided.  "Apparently the steward had an affair with the stillroom maid, and the housekeeper murdered her in a fit of jealous rage."

In the Austen household, Cassandra served as stillroom maid.  The stillroom was where produce was preserved, fruit wines were made, and simple medicines were distilled.  Hence the term, "still room."  A stillroom book would have been a household's compilation of both recipes and remedies. 

I've researched and reconstructed a number of stillroom receipts for my character, Tess Arnold.  But I feel compelled to add, in the interest of my readers' health:  Don't try these at home....

Stephanie