PD James on 'Death Comes to Pemberley'

Like many – probably most – novelists, I am happiest when plotting and planning or writing a new book, and the period in between, once the excitement of the publication is over, is usually spent considering what to write next. The prospect of becoming 90 was a time of important decision-making, since I had become increasingly aware that neither years nor creative energy last forever. After the publication of my latest Dalgliesh story, The Private Patient, in 2008, I decided that I could be self-indulgent and turn to an idea that had been in my mind for some time: to combine my two lifelong enthusiasms, namely for writing detective fiction and for the novels of Jane Austen, by setting my next book in Pemberley.

My own feeling about sequels is ambivalent, largely because the greatest writing pleasure for me is in the creation of original characters, and I have never been tempted to take over another writer’s people or world, but I can well understand the attraction of continuing the story of Elizabeth and Darcy. Austen’s characters take such a hold on our imagination that the wish to know more of them is irresistible, and it is perhaps not surprising that there have been more than 70 sequels to Austen’s novels.

Pride and Prejudice, which was originally titled First Impressions, was written between October 1796 and August 1797. Austen’s father wrote to a London bookseller, Thomas Cadell, to ask if he had any interest in seeing the manuscript, but he declined by return of post. It was in 1811 and 1812 that Austen revised the novel, making it shorter, and it was published in 1813 under the title Pride and Prejudice. It is frustrating that the original manuscript has not been discovered as it would have been fascinating to see what portions were excised and which retained and possibly extended.

In Death Comes to Pemberley, I have chosen the earlier date of 1797 for the marriages both of Elizabeth and her older sister Jane, and the book begins in 1803 when Elizabeth and Darcy have been happily together for six years and are preparing for the annual autumn ball which will take place the next evening.

With their guests, which include Jane and her husband Bingley, they have been enjoying an informal family dinner followed by music and are preparing to retire for the night when Darcy sees from the window a chaise being driven at speed down the road from the wild woodlands. When the galloping horses have been pulled to a standstill, Lydia Wickham, Elizabeth’s youngest sister, almost falls from the chaise, hysterically screaming that her husband has been murdered. Darcy organises a search party and, with the discovery of a blood-smeared corpse in the woodlands, the peace both of the Darcys and of Pemberley is shattered as the family becomes involved in a murder investigation.

Pride and Prejudice is the most popular of Austen’s novels and one can understand why. Its heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, clever, witty and energetic, is probably the most enchanting female character in English literature. Austen, in a light-hearted letter to her sister Cassandra, wrote: “The work is rather too light and bright and sparkling – it wants to be stretched out with… solemn specious nonsense… that would form a contrast and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and Epigrammation of the general style.” The style is indeed rich in wit, playfulness and epigrams, and it contains two great set pieces: the odious Mr Collins’s proposal of marriage to Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s verbal victory over the interfering Lady Catherine de Bourgh when she arrives to warn Elizabeth against marriage to her nephew, Mr Darcy.

In one sense, Pride and Prejudice is a novel about marriage. Lydia’s elopement with Wickham is the most distressing incident in the book and, since it is based on no more than animal high spirits on her part and sexual attraction , is unlikely to be lastingly happy. Jane and Bingley are clearly meant for each other by temperament and can look forward to a lifetime together based on enduring love and common interests. Meanwhile, the happy family life of Jane’s aunt and uncle, the Gardiners, is founded on mature love and companionship, and is an attractive picture of a successful marriage.

However, Mr and Mrs Bennet are clearly mismatched, an example in Austen of a man who was so entranced by youth and beauty that he finds himself married to a wife described in Pride and Prejudice as “a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper”. The marriage of the self-important and obviously repulsive Mr Collins (Elizabeth’s second cousin and heir to the family estate at Longbourn) and Charlotte Lucas (Elizabeth’s friend) is undoubtedly mercenary. Mr Collins wants a wife while Charlotte wants a home of her own, as well as the prospect of becoming mistress of Longbourn when Mr Bennet dies . It is not, however, an unsatisfactory marriage, and when Elizabeth visits the parsonage at Hunsford, she witnesses the clever contrivance with which Charlotte ensures that she sees as little as possible of her husband.

Austen’s six completed novels are also surely unusual in portraying no satisfactory mother. Emma’s mother is dead, as is Anne’s in Persuasion, and although Mrs Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility is attractive and charming, the over-sensibility that prevented her from questioning her daughter Marianne about her relationship with the dashing Willoughby leads to tragedy for Marianne and even the risk of death.

Austen’s most satisfactory mother has to be Mrs Morland in Northanger Abbey, but I am not sure she was wise in allowing her daughter Catherine to accept an invitation from her neighbours the Allens to join them on a visit to Northanger Abbey. This was trusting too much in Mrs Allen’s good sense, of which we have little evidence.

But the worst mother has to be Mrs Bennet who, with her loud vulgarity, is a continual embarrassment to her elder daughters. Even so, Mrs Bennet’s main interest in life – obtaining of husbands for her daughters – was more understandably responsible than Mr Bennet’s neglect when one considers what their daughters’ lives would have been had Mr and Mrs Collins inherited Longbourn before the Bennet girls were married off.

Nearly all my detective stories have had their genesis in a place and setting, which is important to any work of fiction and is particularly so in a crime novel, especially if there is contrast between peace, order and beauty and the contaminating eruption of violent death. This contrast is assured by setting a murder mystery in the grounds of Pemberley, a house that in my book enshrines married happiness, children, a household at peace with each other and a daily life in which duty to the community, learning, tradition and an ordered, civilised lifestyle embody all that is good about the age.

However, even as Elizabeth is listening after dinner to Darcy’s sister Georgiana playing , she is visited by thoughts of another world outside Pemberley, the world of violence, cruelty and death. It is a world with which Austen deliberately did not deal. A new reader, particularly if not born in England, would find it difficult to believe that the brutalities and violence of the French Revolution were a recent memory, that the country was at war with France and that there were vast gulfs between the world of the prosperous country gentlemen or the successful London merchants and that of the rural and urban poor.

There is one sentence in Pride and Prejudice that always shocks me by its unexpectedness. The younger Bennet girls, returning from a visit to the officers stationed at Meryton, report among the trivial news they bring that a private has been flogged, an intrusion of harsh reality into a glittering romantic and happy novel, which is the only mention by Austen of the barbarity of the military discipline of her age.

For me, one of the joys of writing Death Comes to Pemberley was revisiting once again the world of Longbourn and Pemberley and finding, as I always do, fresh insights and delights. It also gave me an opportunity to address a problem of plotting that I found in the original novel, but I was concerned to write a true detective story with clues to the truth of what happened available to the reader and, I hope, an ending that is both believable and satisfying.

All six Jane Austen novels have a common theme that is the stuff of all romantic fiction – a worthy and attractive young woman finds her way through difficulties and disappointments to marriage with the man of her choice – but here the commonplace is transformed into high art by the pen of a genius. I must apologise to Austen for introducing into her love story what she herself described as “guilt and misery and such odious subjects” and I hope that my novel will give as much pleasure to readers as it did to me in the writing and that they will have the added joy, as did I, of returning once again to Pride and Prejudice.

© PD James, 2011. All rights reserved.

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