{"id":545,"date":"2011-07-26T15:54:27","date_gmt":"2011-07-26T21:54:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/myparticularfriend.com\/wordpress\/?p=545"},"modified":"2011-07-28T10:40:50","modified_gmt":"2011-07-28T16:40:50","slug":"it%e2%80%99s-new-to-me-jane-and-the-unpleasantness-at-scargrave-manor-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/myparticularfriend.com\/?p=545","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s new to me: Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jane<\/a>I usually claim in my retro reviews how it\u2019s inexplicable that I haven\u2019t gotten around to reading this or that, but in the case of Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor<\/em> by Stephanie Barron, the truth is that I\u2019ve been reluctant to read other Jane Austen-themed mysteries because of my own poor efforts at the genre.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But of late it\u2019s been embarrassing to say that I haven\u2019t read Ms. Barron\u2019s stories where Jane Austen acts as the detective, in this case attempting to clear the name of her friend Isobel, the newly married Countess of Scargrave, accused of the death of her husband. And then she must also take on the task of defending Fitzroy Payne, the new Earl of Scargrave, after he is accused of murdering Isobel\u2019s accuser.<\/p>\n

Jane had been invited by her friend to the ball the soon to be dead Earl of Scargrave is throwing in Isobel\u2019s honor. He dies a pretty horrific death that is at first attributed to his overindulgence of the good life but is later suspected to be poison. At her friend\u2019s pleading, Jane remains to give Isobel moral support. The book is supposedly taken from Jane\u2019s diary entries, and includes letters to her sister Cassandra. The book takes place after her father has retired and moved the family, much to Jane\u2019s displeasure, to Bath. Other characters include Isobel\u2019s aunt Madame Delahoussaye and her daughter Fanny, and Isobel\u2019s maid Marguerite. All four women hail from Barbados, where Isobel\u2019s family estates are coveted by the insidious Lord Trowbridge (a boo and hiss are called for here), who is inexplicably also a guest at the ball. Oh, and then there\u2019s the scapegrace (love that word) Lt. Tom Hearst (killed a man just for snoring \u2026 err, for accusing him of cheating at cards) and his sanctimonious brother George, who are cousins of the new earl. This stew of characters is made all the more savory by the denied love between the new earl and the old earl\u2019s wife.<\/p>\n

And these are just the main characters, with little cameos from Austen brothers Francis and Henry, and Henry\u2019s wife Eliza, or more formally the Comtess de Feuillide. In truth, there may be a few too many characters, but don\u2019t worry, there is a little thinning as in an Agatha Christie story, where suspects conveniently die. Oh, and did I mention the ghost of the first Earl of Scargrave, who appears early in the book and waits until the concluding chapters to reappear?<\/p>\n

I enjoyed the book but I can\u2019t call it a page turner, and I think that left me with mixed emotions. The book title proudly proclaims it as \u201cBeing the first Jane Austen mystery,\u201d so I naturally started reading it as a mystery and expected the pacing of the aforementioned Christie instead of the ruminative pacing of Austen. But Austen doesn\u2019t really strike one as a great detective, despite showing some real Sherlockian powers of deduction early on. Her powers of deduction don\u2019t come to her as easily as they do to Poirot, Miss Marple or Sherlock Holmes. In fact, she is as often surprised by the twists and turns of the case as is presumably the reader.<\/p>\n

In the end, I think Ms. Barron\u2019s decision to not make Jane Austen a super sleuth a wise one. We think we know Jane and consider her perceptive and insightful but, I doubt we\u2019ve ever thought of her as a detective. Instead in Ms. Barron\u2019s novel, Jane Austen shines as a very bright woman who is devotedly loyal to her friends and who will do the best she can to help them. That characterization rings true and I think makes a better book than if Jane were to go around with a magnifying lens.<\/p>\n

And now that I\u2019ve had my first taste of \u201cthe first Jane Austen mystery,\u201d I am ready to read the next story, which I believe is \u201cJane and the Man of the Cloth.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I usually claim in my retro reviews how it\u2019s inexplicable that I haven\u2019t gotten around to reading this or that, but in the case of Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor by Stephanie Barron, the truth is that I\u2019ve been reluctant to read other Jane Austen-themed mysteries because of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-austen-reviews","category-jane-austen","column","threecol"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p32UJ9-8N","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/myparticularfriend.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/myparticularfriend.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/myparticularfriend.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/myparticularfriend.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/myparticularfriend.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=545"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/myparticularfriend.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":565,"href":"http:\/\/myparticularfriend.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions\/565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/myparticularfriend.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/myparticularfriend.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/myparticularfriend.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}