There are some shrewd bits of character work here, but it’s largely working over the plot of the previous novel, and projecting how the new living arrangements will work out. I kept remembering the passage in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History where Richard, away at a party at a friend’s country house, indulges a fantasy:

of living there, of not having to go back ever to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture; of living there with Charles and Camilla and Henry and Francis and maybe even Bunny; of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college; of everything remaining exactly as it was, that instant…

And we all know how that worked out. (If you don’t, give that book a read. Terrific fun.) All the arrangements seem to slot together rather too well, particularly given the conversation in Chapter 32 of P&P about how a woman may be “settled too near her family”, with its blend of Elizabeth’s longing for her own independent life and guilt over whether that involves being ashamed of her family. I think the phrase “fifty miles of good road” is splendidly ambiguous (and recently discovered it’s the name of an Austen fanfiction community.)

The first twelve pages feel like a fantasia on Elizabeth and Darcy’s engagement, a calculation of how everything will be alright now that’s settled, and criticisms aside, that immediately locates the book. We’re encouraged to see it as a working out of stories and characters which were present in Pride and Prejudice. There are different ways a novel can derive from, respond to or somehow continue an earlier work, and Death Comes To Pemberley makes it fairly clear that this is will be a close engagement with its primogenitor. Story continues directly onwards: same main character, similar point of view and locations we’ve seen to a certain extent. That sounds a rather mechanical checklist, but since the novel is in a (partially) different genre it’s worth stressing the extent to which it doesn’t advertise a radical departure from the setting and mode of Pride and Prejudice.

Unfortunately, this means that it has a tendency to the line I identified in my previous post, of pointing out important things which Austen missed out. Since Death begins so closely to Pride, when it diverges it feels like a conscious addition to the first novel’s vision of the world. Servants make their appearance as fuller characters, Wollstonecraft is name-checked, and we are made more aware of a Wider World. It wouldn’t be fair to dismiss the whole book on this basis, and it contains a lot of very enjoyable writing and deft plotting, but there are some deeply surprising moments from an author who apparently respects Austen as much as James does.

For example, Elizabeth sits listening to the wind in Pemberley’s chimneys, and is hounded by

an emotion which she had never known before. She thought ‘Here we sit at the beginning of a new century, citizens of the most civilized country in Europe, surrounded by the splendour of its craftsmanship, its art and the books which enshrine its literature, while outside there is another world which wealth and education and privilege can keep from us, a world in which men are as violent and destructive as is the animal world. Perhaps even the most fortunate of us will not be able to ignore it and keep it at bay for ever.’

It’s unclear in the context whether this is a reflection on the French Revolution, social class or simply Elizabeth “growing up”, but it rather takes me aback to be told that she had never realised that there was an unfriendly rapacious world out there. A significant part of Austen’s original novel (as well as other of her works such as Sense and Sensibility) expends an awful lot of time making it clear that social conventions damn women both ways: determining many of their life choices and opportunities if they stay within the limits, and marking them as “fair game” if they step beyond them. Admittedly Austen’s characters are all of a certain class, but a lot of them are almost obsessively aware of the importance of “respectability”. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that this awareness doesn’t stem entirely from docile acceptance of the need to be a “good girl”, and that it involves a strong, if vague, conception of the exploitation and violence which lies beyond that category.

“Ruin” isn’t a pearl-clutching abstraction for Austen heroines. I mention this because her work is so often dismissed from serious consideration by either enthusiasts who want to claim her as a dating expert, or detractors who see her as a silly woman sheltered from the real world. This isn’t an abstract point of how we frame particular historical texts, it’s having consequences right now. I’ve heard an English Master’s student sarcastically brush off the idea that reading Austen would be worthwhile for her “Because I so want to read about women in corsets fainting all over each other and whatever”, and the assumption that books by women about their lives can have only niche value underpins the sneering category of “chick-lit”. It’s a common point of view, though one which ignores facts such as the apparent influence on Austen’s early work of Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

An even more startling piece of Hark, The Wider World comes about halfway through the novel, during a discussion of whether Georgiana Darcy should be sent away from Pemberley whilst the murder is investigated, or be allowed to help in a very minor capacity:

It was then that Alveston intervened. “Forgive me, sir, but I feel I must speak. You discuss what Miss Darcy should do as if she were a child. We have entered the nineteenth century; we do not need to be a disciple of Mrs Wollstonecraft to feel that women should not be denied a voice in matters that concern them. It is some centuries since we accepted that a woman has a soul. Is it not time that we accepted she also has a mind?”

This is so startlingly shoehorned in that I was almost tempted to class it as a joke. The Wollstobomb is so enthusiastically dropped that I assumed it was either a deliberate frivolity or James was setting her own character up. I’m still unsure about what she’s trying to do here: whether Alveston is intended to be an earnest little prig who is interfering in family business, or the voice of change and the coming century. The former seems to imply that feminism is rather unnecessary in a well-ordered country house where the patriarch is a decent fellow, and the latter to imply (once again) that Austen managed to miss the great world outside her village.

A later passage, which has no obvious connection to gender, decided me. Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam are discussing a forthcoming trial (whose, I shan’t mention, for fear of spoilerating) and the jury system. On Darcy’s remarking that the jury will be swayed by their own prejudices and the eloquence of the prosecuting counsel, with no chance of appeal, Fitzwilliam replies:

“How can there be? The decision of the jury has always been sacrosanct. What are you proposing, Darcy, a second jury, sworn in to agree or disagree with the first and another jury after that? That would be the ultimate idiocy, and if carried on ad infinitum could presumably result in a foreign court trying English cases. And that would be the end of more than our legal system.”

That sound is the fictional fabric of this novel splitting apart, so loudly that I can’t even hear Fitzwilliam continuing to speak and hoping that before the end of the century a reform might be introduced whereby the defending counsel will also have the right to a concluding speech. This is clearly intended to be a joke, though I’m again not sure what the joke is. Is it a riff on terrible historical novelists who begin sentences with “Are you suggesting that some day in the future…” or a leaden frolic in the same vein as those novelists?

Either way, it seems to make P.D. James’ technique rather clearer in this novel. Whilst apparently continuing Pride and Prejudice, she also seems to be bouncing parts of history off it in an attempt to broaden Austen’s horizons or simply make fun of the original. Though it’s a skilfully written book from one of my favourite crime novelists, it’s an uneasy read. Mainly because it falls now and then into the sort of approaches to Austen which, as I’ve suggested, belittle her art and relegate “women’s writing” to a cross between a diary column and a dating manual.

Design by Faber, Illustration Neil Gower

It’s difficult not to take this book as something of a betrayal. Not of principles or community, but of me personally, and the fact that I’ve always admired P.D. James as someone who really understood Jane Austen. (By which I mean, agreed with me. Naturally.) When I was an undergraduate I went to see P.D. James speak about detective fiction, and she said one of the most brilliant things I have ever heard anyone say about literature. She declared calmly that Austen’s Emma was the most perfect detective novel in the English language. It gave the reader all the information, she argued, in a perfectly fair way and just let them come to exactly the wrong conclusion for themselves. At the twist, you can look back and see where you went wrong, and how obvious the answer was if you’d only thought it through. And then you can read the novel again, enjoying your awareness of the double tracks the story moves along – knowing about the other story half-submerged in the surface narrative, and switching your attention between them when they come into contact.

I loved this statement so much because it showed a respect for Austen as an artist, and a recognition that her works are deliberately crafted and not simply cleverly observed portraits from life or timeless insights into human nature. They’re literary artefacts with their own integrity and internal structures, something which often gets missed by both detractors and enthusiasts. The former castigate her for not including economics, the Napoleonic Wars or shifting models of gender relations, because no one ever stands up in an Austen novel and tells everyone how worried they are about economics, the Napoleonic Wars or shifting models of gender relations. This is treating her like a newspaper, not a novelist, as if it was Austen’s duty to set down the events of the day in order of importance, and by not explicitly tackling the aftermath of the 1789 revolution she has relegated herself to the Lifestyle supplement.

In order to see the economics and politics in the novels, you have to first take them seriously as works of art whose stories and shapes have some sort of weight, not naive diary columns to be discarded if they don’t trumpet their opinions on current affairs. At which point you notice that the legal arrangements which tie up Mr Bennett’s estate in Pride and Prejudice prevent his daughters from inheriting it, meaning that their survival is dependent upon marrying relatively soon, particularly as the eligible young officers of the militia may be posted to another camp at any time. The entire Lydia-Wickham subplot takes place at the intersection between the legal instruments of primogeniture and the troop movements of the Napoleonic Campaigns. But we can only see this if we stop reading the novels as a transparent window onto the period they were written in, and respect them as novels whose internal structures give them meaning.

Design by Headlinel, Illustration Roxanna Bikadoroff

Exactly the same mistake is made in the opposite direction, I think, by Austen enthusiasts and the outlets of the Dating-Industrial-Complex. The Jane Austen Dating School, Jane Austen’s Guide to Romance: The Regency Rules, The Jane Austen Guide to Living Happily Ever After and all the rest seem to assume that the value of these novels about courtship in the Regency lies in how similar they might be to courtship in the second Elizabethan era. The blurb of one suggests that “we might have just lost touch with the fundamental rules” of dating, and offers “the only relationship guide based on stories that really have stood the test of time…full of concrete advice and wise strategies that illustrate how honesty, self-awareness and forthrightness do win the right man in the end and weed out the losers, playboys and toxic flirts.” For this attitude, Austen was the Monet of prose fiction – only an eye, but my God, what an eye. The novels can offer us nothing but a meticulous copy of reality, which we can superimpose over our own lives and shuffle around the pieces so they match. It lacks a sense that the works might not be porous and amorphous, that we can’t simply dip in and haul up a ladle full of “Austen”, but might have to investigate where that particular ladleful came from and what relation it bore to the bucketful around it. For the dating guides, the stories lack individual integrity and shape, they can just be copied and printed across any surface like a Cath Kidston pattern.

Both attitudes are obviously, as that Tumblr would say, PROBLEMATIC. The first tends to deny that women writers writing about women’s lives can have any significance beyond their literal content. It’s the attitude that provides us with a women’s supplement in newspapers because everything else in the paper is assumed to pertain to men. It reinforces the supposed distinction between a private female sphere, in which dating and clothes are the ruling topics, and a male public sphere where politics and economics takes place. The second underpins the male/female spheres in a slightly different way, encouraging us to think that one of the great female writers is mostly interesting because of what she can tell us about Catching A Man. It takes Austen’s insights into the inequalities of social life and the power imbalances between the genders, and calcifies those inequalities as the fundamental “rules” of dating. More generally, the lack of concern for the specific form of the works seem to risk playing into a long-standing tradition in Western thinking to associate men with “form” and women with “content”. I may be over-reading that last point, but the line from Plato to Augustine to critiques of women’s fiction as interchangeable “slush” provides a definite context for thinking about attitudes to Austen which assume her writing is an undifferentiated and unstructured mass.

P.D. James seemed to be standing out against both these approaches, insisting that books like Emma or Sense and Sensibility deserved respect as consciously crafted artefacts, whose meanings couldn’t be reduced to their surface in either direction. Along with that came a respect for the distinction between “Jane Austen’s world” and the books which Austen wrote – that the novels were neither a photographic copy of Regency life, not were they series of episodes in a world-building project which could be placed end-to-end to produce a fictional universe across which characters could wander. On the contrary, each one had its own concerns and perspective.

Or so I thought. When she wrote Death Comes To Pemberley it seemed that James had displayed the same attitude as the dating guides and the Austen pastiche industry: that her novels could be regarded as creating “Austenworld”, which anyone could stroll in and out of at will. Slightly ironically, it was her comments about Emma as the most perfect detective novel in the language which made me think that writing an actual detective novel set in Pemberley demonstrated a cavalier disdain for the integrity and form of Pride and Prejudice.

• In Part II I’ll discuss Death Comes to Pemberley itself, and the apparently patronising way it treats feminism (someone really does have a speech to the effect of “But have you not heard of a book which has been written by one Wollstonecraft?”) Then, putting my own massive sulk aside, I’ll explore the possibility that the problems are not with the novel’s attitude to feminism, but its attitude to history.
• EDIT: Read Part II of this post!