Weekly Lizard

Death Comes to Pemberley, Author’s Note:
“I owe an apology to the shade of Jane Austen for involving her beloved Elizabeth in the trauma of a murder investigation, especially as in the final chapter of Mansfield Park Miss Austen made her views plain: ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.’ No doubt she would have replied to my apology by saying that, had she wished to dwell on such odious subjects, she would have written this story herself, and done it better.”

Writers have many different reasons for taking on another author’s characters. Some do it out of devotion to the original text, others do it out of an urge to revise a familiar story. Murder mystery maven P. D. James has done a bit of both in Death Comes to Pemberley, an inventive sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in which Darcy and Elizabeth’s happy marriage is interrupted by a brutal murder. James skillfully re-creates the world of Austen’s novel and sets within it a riveting detective story that Simon Brett of the Sunday Express called “as good as anything P. D. James has written and that is very high praise indeed.” The appeal for the reader is clear—who wouldn’t want to see one master take on another?—but what of the author? Writing in the Telegraph, James herself noted that “the greatest writing pleasure for me is in the creation of original characters, I have never been tempted to take over another writer’s people or world.” Still, as a lifelong Austen fan, she found she could not resist the urge. “Austen’s characters take such a hold on our imagination,” she says, “that the wish to know more of them is irresistible.”

Certainly, James is not the first to extend the lives of another author’s characters in an homage to their creator. Joe Gores’s Spade & Archer is a prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. The book—a mystery, of course—maps the origin of the partnership between Sam Spade and Miles Archer, notoriously bumped off in the early pages of The Maltese Falcon. An ardent Hammett fan, Gores told Stanford Magazine that the choice to write a prequel was primarily inspired by questions he had about The Maltese Falcon’s mysterious lead: “Spade says several times in Falcon, ‘This is my town. You maybe could have operated here if you hadn’t run across me but now you have to deal with me.’ And I thought, ‘Why is this his town?’” His words echo James’s wish to “know more” of Austen’s characters. By placing these familiar characters in new settings, James and Gores are able to both honor the original source material as well as provide the reader with a cracking new story.

Other authors choose to tell a well-known story from a new perspective, as Karen Essex did in Dracula in Love, a version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula told from Mina Harker’s point of view. “I want to state outright: I revere Bram Stoker,” she says in an essay for the Reading Group Center. But Essex indicates that she was less interested in writing a new story for these characters as much as she was in adding dimension the original. “My ambition for Dracula in Love…was to turn the original story inside out and expose its underbelly or its ‘subconscious mind,’” she writes. “I wanted to give Mina and Lucy rich, full lives, as well as plausible inner lives.” Essex is able to tease out a wholly original novel, in the same way Valerie Martin does in Mary Reilly, a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “Not everything in my book is in [Stevenson’s], nor is any of his in mine,” said Martin in an interview with The New York Times. While both Dracula in Love and Mary Reilly were written in response to another work, each one stands alone as a discrete novel.

Each of these books provides new context for a classic, giving the reader an opportunity to re-examine his or her perception of the original work. In Death Comes to Pemberley, P. D. James has reworked the genre as well as the story. Uniting a murder mystery with Austen’s world, James creates a marriage as happy as that of Elizabeth and Darcy and proves once again her mastery of the written word. As Emma Lee-Potter of the Daily Express notes, “In another writer’s hands a plot that plunges Elizabeth and Darcy into the midst of a murder investigation could have been disastrous. James, with her writing skills and lifelong passion for Jane Austen’s work, takes the challenge in her stride. . . . She adds that if Austen had written this book she would have done it better. I’m not so sure.”

Those interested in conducting an independent investigation need only to read James’s book alongside Pride and Prejudice. Does James do Austen justice? Does Austen’s world support James’s deft plotting? Tell us in the comments!