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?