Lynn Shepherd – Murder At Mansfield Park

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Book Review, Crime Fiction, Jane Austen, Literary pastiche, Lynn Shepherd, Murder At Mansfield Park

As through a prism, darkly

Mansfield Park was always a rather less satisfying Austen novel, principally because of the curiously un-Austen like heroine. Fanny Price always seemed like a model for the late Victorian (Dickensian) sweet natured, pedestal dwelling model of selfless, long suffering martyred and hard done by woman, rather than the intelligent, articulate , witty woman of spirit, who also learns, changes and grows in depth that Austen generally places centre stage.

I think many readers must have suspected that Mary Crawford was the real central character, but that somewhere along the line Austen shuffled her out of the way, and pushed a character of secondary interest, Fanny, into the spotlight. It’s as if, in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Bennett, rather than Elizabeth, had been the central character

However, for all the original Fanny’s apparent sweetness, Kingsley Amis professed to see something devious, describing her as

a monster of complacency and pride, who, under a cloak of cringing self-abasement, dominates and gives meaning to the novel.

First-time novelist Lynn Shepherd appears to use this as a springboard, with inventive imagination and a sure mastery of Austen’s style, and a satisfying sense of period and immersion inside the original novel.

She makes a few radical changes, most particularly of wealth and therefore status, and from thence sets in train new relationships and alliances, and a tie-in between Mansfield Park and a murder mystery. Fanny, now blessed with more wealth than anyone else, and therefore a being of status, to be courted, not despised, becomes rather obviously Amis’ monster.

The central character of this novel is the one most readers probably found the natural central character of the original – Mary Crawford, here, with the wit, intelligence and sensitivity to others which she so often showed in the original novel, before Austen seemed to collect herself and start flinging a lot of baser motivations and over emphasis on financial gain towards her. However, what we do have, is the Crawfords, brother and sister, of a lesser status and fewer means than the others, and therefore, more aware of the day-to-day gradations of class and position. All the above stairs characters of the original novel are in place, as they were, but seen as if through a prism which changes how we see them – certain virtues become flaws, certain flaws may be seen as virtues. And, in addition, we are introduced to a cast of below stairs characters at Mansfield Park itself, and the new tensions provoked by the influx of an early nineteenth century detective into the mix.

Shepherd has fun with various characters introducing ideas – as fantasies – of what will be later tools of detection into the mix – someone for example wishing it were possible to identify whose blood is on a garment, and somebody else ridiculing the whole idea that this would ever be possible.

It would insult Shepherd to say she has written a very accomplished pastiche. What she has done, is to immerse herself into an original text, and use that as a springboard into something else (whilst, admittedly using quite a bit of the original text and subverting it to her own devices) I very much look forward to reading what she will do with other classic texts – Bleak House is the next! – Tom All Alone’s

Murder At Mansfield Park Amazon UK
Murder At Mansfield Park Amazon USA

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Lynn Shepherd – A Treacherous Likeness

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A Treacherous Likeness, Biography as Fiction, Book Review, Crime Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Lynn Shepherd, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley

The French Lieutenant’s Lying Skylark

Lynn Shepherd continues her sure, impeccably researched, stylish, dark, inventive journey into the historical, literary, murder mystery genre.

Lest this all sounds far too much of a hotch-potch, rest assured Shepherd is an author who can collect together bits and pieces of information, literary genres, literary tricks, and make something new so that you don’t even notice the joins

This is her third book with one of two detectives, both called Charles Maddox. Each book can be read as a stand-alone, but there is no doubt there is an especial enjoyment to be had if the reader has made the earlier journeys.

Her first book saw Charles Maddox senior, investigating an alternative world for Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Mansfield Park had a much less satisfying, rather glumly good long suffering victim heroine, Fanny Price, rather than the usual spirited, intelligent woman Austen gives us. Using THAT book as a springboard, Shepherd gave the world a twist, and brought a darker world, though still witty, into play, with the investigation of a murder, Murder at Mansfield Park

With her second novel, she got even darker and seamier, in Tom-All-Alone’s (Charles Maddox 2), an amalgam of Dickens’ Bleak House, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman In White, and Henry Mayhew’s real investigation of the dark underbelly of Victorian capitalism, London Labour and the London Poor (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature) So, she was still playing with plots from classic novels, and this time, her detective was Charles Maddox junior (great nephew of the Austen detective)

                       Shelley

  Mary Shelley

For this third book, she blurs the division between the real and the imagined still further, as young Charles Maddox (with the elder Maddox involved in the ensuing events forty years earlier) investigates the mysterious, messy lives of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his female circle – he of the tangled romantic liaisons with  very young women (something Shepherd rightly identifies a twenty first century reader might feel remarkably queasy about).

Espousing anarchism, free love, atheism at the early part of the eighteenth century was one thing – and no doubt Shelley and his poetry fed easily into libertarian sympathies (plus of course some soaring, elegiac poetry) However, as biographers have shown (and Shepherd utilises) the man did seem to bring an extraordinary collection of ruined young women, suicides, and the death of children along with him.

There seems at the time to have been a bit of an industry by his widow (Mary Shelley,the probable author of Frankenstein – though this has been more recently in question), surviving son, and son’s wife, to give Shelley’s life a severe whitewashing. Modern biographers have uncovered a lot of supposed very shady goings on, with the whole gang of Shelleys and Godwins of dubious moral scruples. A pretty stinking kettle of fish, all told.

Claire Claremont

It is this tangled web of whitewashed history, possibly very dirty linen and intrigue which Shepherd unleashes Charles Maddox into, turning a dark and shocking tale at times deliciously playful as she makes us, the reader, complicit as omniscient readers to her omniscient narrator.

However, much as I enjoyed this book, and the way Shepherd mangled my perceptions, and toyed with my understanding of what was going on and whom to believe, I am left with a couple of very uncomfortable questions about the ethics of `rewriting’ real people’s lives, particularly with some very murky allegations indeed. I discovered Shepherd `invented’ less than I thought she did, as she very correctly identifies which facts have been unearthed by recent, unwhitewashed biographies, and where she invented, but still, I have questions about `faction’.  It is one thing to imagine how a real person may have felt at the time of a real event, or what their motivations may have been for their real actions; it is quite another to invent dark events, which they are the protagonists of. I was left with a sense of moral ambiguity. What are the ethics of literary invention, in the lives of real people? Shepherd may well have transgressed such ethics. The dead cannot speak.

                                         Shelley and Godwin Tree

I received this as a pre-release ARC

Readers beware, for some obscure reason, exactly as with her second novel, there is a different title and publisher for the US and UK editions – BOTH of which are available on Amazon UK. This novel is called A Treacherous Likeness published by Corsair. In August, A Fatal Likeness (the same book!) will be published by Delacorte. Very confusing and annoying!

A Treacherous Likeness Amazon UK
A Fatal Likeness Amazon USA

Gail Godwin – Flora. It’s publication day!

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Book Review, Flora, Gail Godwin

It’s release day in the States, and in a couple of days in the UK. This is a subtle, thoughtful, perceptive piece of writing Here is my original review, written back in March after receiving it as an ARC from NetGalley in digital format