Lynn Shepherd, debut author and today's guest blogger talks about Austen, Christie and how they inspired her new book MURDER AT MANSFIELD PARK. This is one of those books that certainly stands on it's own for book club, but would also be great to do either right after Austen's MANSFIELD PARK or even both the same month if you're group is game. Yup... another one that I'm putting on my must read list.
Ask any Jane Austen fan which of her books they like the best,and most of them will probably say PRIDE & PREJUDICE. Ask them which they find the most challenging, and I’m pretty sure a lot of them will say MANSFIELD PARK. Even Austen herself said it was “not half so entertaining” as its celebrated predecessor, and it’s clear she was trying to do something a little different with this novel. In fact, that’s one reason why I’ve always found MANSFIELD PARK so intriguing.
There’s Austen’s usual romantic storyline, and many of the same themes you find in the other novels, but somehow it doesn’t quite come together - there just isn’t the same sparkle. A lot of that is down to the fact that MANSFIELD PARK has a very different class of heroine, and a very different class of hero too. There’s no witty Elizabeth Bennet here, no lively if misguided Emma Woodhouse; Fanny Price is feeble, passive, and for the most part silent. And Edmund Bertram isn’t much better – a more ponderous, sanctimonious leading man would indeed be hard to imagine!
Ever since I first read the novel I’ve always thought Austen cast her characters in the wrong roles – that the bright, vivacious Mary Crawford was a far more suitable Austen heroine – and this was one of the starting points for my own book. The first half of MURDER AT MANSFIELD PARK puts a new and different twist on the basic set-up of Austen’s original. The same setting, many of the same episodes and characters (though with some telling differences here and there), but all done with what I hope people will think is a lighter touch – and certainly with a lot more pace and humour (a bit like PRIDE & PREJUDICE, in fact!).
The second half of the book is where the murder part of the title comes in, and I can’t do much better here than quote what the novelist Rachel Billington has said about it. Rachel is, of course, the author of a very successful Austen sequel herself:
“Lynn Shepherd had a great idea: inject the supposedly staid world of Jane Austen with a grisly murder. The result is thoroughly entertaining and keeps the reader and the neighbourhood guessing, rather as if Agatha Christie was writing in the early nineteenth century.”
I love this quote, because the whole idea of staging a murder at MANSFIELD PARK did indeed stem from my realisation that Jane Austen’s novel actually starts with many of the same elements of a classic Christie: a big country house, a family at war with itself (even if all appears calm enough on the surface), and the arrival of a dangerously charming outsider to trigger an unexpected and disastrous chain of events. In MANSFIELD PARK the result is scandal and elopement – in mine, it’s violence and murder.
I had immense fun writing this part of the book, not least because it allowed me to take more charge of the development of the narrative, and introduce a completely new character of my own – Charles Maddox, the thief taker summoned from London to help solve the crime (though as you’ll find, that’s not the only thing that happens as a result). Someone recently asked me at a book festival whether I was like so many other female crime writers, and had fallen in love with my own detective, and I had to confess I had!
I hope MURDER AT MANSFIELD PARK will be a really enjoyable choice for reading groups. You can either read it on its own (it works perfectly well as a standalone story), or have even more fun and read it in tandem with Austen’s original. That way you’ll pick up all the little references and jokes and hidden ‘nuggets’ I wove into the book. We’ve also put some questions at the back, which would be a good starting point for a game of ‘compare and contrast’.
I’d love to hear what people think of the book – I’m always avid to hear from real readers, so do please visit my website and leave some feedback!
www.lynn-shepherd.com.
