The Mysteries of Miss Jane Austen
My debut novel, Miss Austen Investigates, The Hapless Milliner, is a tribute to the life and work of Jane Austen in the form of a murder mystery. It begins with a 19-year-old Jane enjoying a flirtation with a handsome gentleman at a glittering ball. Unfortunately, their romance is cut short when a milliner is found bludgeoned to death.
(3 Tips on How to Make Murder Funny in Fiction.)
Jane wants to solve the crime as she knew and respected the milliner, but the case turns personal after her gentle brother, Georgy, is accused. Now she has only seven weeks to find the true culprit, or Georgy will be hanged for a crime she knows he could never commit.
Austen is usually associated with romance, but there is a long tradition of combining her influence with mystery too (P.D. James’s Death Comes To Pemberley is my favorite example). This is because Austen’s novels are essentially mysteries: her heroines work to uncover the true character of those around her, especially the character of the hero.
In a world where a woman’s future depends entirely upon who she marries, it’s imperative to investigate one’s prospective spouse. Think of Elizabeth Bennet comparing Darcy’s account with Wickham’s, even interrogating the housekeeper at Pemberley; or Catherine Morland, who gets so carried away with the intrigue and Gothic atmosphere of Northanger Abbey, she accuses her crush’s father of murdering his wife!
To showcase Austen’s resilience, determination, and sparkling wit, I turned her into one of her own sleuthing heroines. Our image of Austen can be informed by the staid spinster, ‘Dear Aunt Jane,’ that her earliest biographers (who were also her relatives) created to protect her reputation.
But Austen’s surviving letters reveal a wonderfully joyful and irreverent woman, who took delight in laughing at her own foibles and teasing her sister, Cassandra, with exaggerated accounts of her flirtations. As Austen herself put it, ‘pictures of perfection… make me sick’ and it is young Jane, the exuberant author of Lady Susan rather than the sophisticated narrator of Persuasion, that I set out to capture in this first installment of Miss Austen Investigates.
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As for why the milliner fell victim, the bonnet is an iconic motif within the tradition of Austen. The producers of the 1940 Hollywood Pride and Prejudice set their adaptation later in the 19th century, so the wardrobe department leaned into the fashion with some truly enormous bonnets. At the other extreme, the costume designers for Shondaland’s Bridgerton banned bonnets, to signal they were presenting a very different version of the Regency.
To subvert this tradition in my own way, I murdered the poor bonnet maker. Milliners occupied a precarious position in Georgian society, as millinery was one of few professions open for women to earn their own money. For this reason, milliners (just like female writers during that time) came under suspicion for being morally lax. One of Austen’s less prosperous aunts was apprenticed as a milliner, before she traveled all the way to India to catch a wealthy husband.
My Jane might be young, a little naïve, and up against a world where manners are more important than murder, but at heart, she’s the brilliant observer of human nature with a fierce passion for justice whom we all know and love.
Check out Jessica Bull’s Miss Austen Investigates, The Hapless Milliner here:
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