The Mysterious Death of Miss Jane Austen (29 page)

Mary Austen suffered a stroke on August 2, 1843, from which she never recovered consciousness. She died the following day. She is buried at Steventon, in James Austen’s vault.

Anne Sharp died on January 8, 1853. Before her death, she passed Jane’s last letter to Dr. Zechariah Sillar, physician to the Northern Hospital, Liverpool. He passed it down to his granddaughter, and on February 8, 1954, it was auctioned at Sotheby’s. The purchasers were Mr. and Mrs. Henry G. Burke of Baltimore. On Mrs. Burke’s death in 1975, it was bequeathed to the Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York.

On May 3, 1948, a lock of Jane Austen’s hair was auctioned at Sotheby’s. It was bought by the same American couple who purchased Anne Sharp’s letter. The following year, the cottage at Chawton where Jane Austen spent the last eight years of her life was opened as a museum. Mrs. Alberta Burke presented the lock of hair as a gift to be displayed alongside other artifacts collected by the Jane Austen Society. Before handing it over, however, her husband had the hair tested in a bid to discover the cause of death. It contained levels of arsenic far exceeding that observed in the body’s natural state.

Lindsay
Ashford, Chawton, 2011

While this is a work of fiction, it grew out of a fascination with the factual material painstakingly accumulated by Austen scholars in the two centuries since her death. Much has been written, but two sources require special mention: Deirdre Le Faye’s
A
Chronology
of
Jane
Austen
and
Her
Family
(Cambridge University Press, 2006) was invaluable to me, as was Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography,
Jane
Austen, a Life
(Viking, 1997).
The
Mysterious
Death
of
Miss
Jane
Austen
is my interpretation of the facts, interwoven with some sequences that are purely imaginary. I urge those wishing to dissect the novel to consult these sources directly.

This book could not have been written without the wonderful research material housed in Chawton House Library—the “Great House” once owned by Jane’s brother, Edward Austen Knight. I am indebted to all the staff there for their help and encouragement—particularly Dr. Gillian Dow, who cast a scholarly eye over the manuscript—and to Sandy Lerner, the American philanthropist who saved the house from ruin and restored it to its former glory. I have been lucky enough to spend the past five years living in part of the original medieval estate, thanks to Richard Knight, Jane Austen’s five-times great nephew, who still owns the dovecote (now a cottage) referred to in the book. I would also like to thank Fiona Sunley, who, with her late husband John, invited me to spend a delightful day at Godmersham.

I am grateful to Tom Carpenter and Louise West of Jane Austen’s House Museum for allowing me to examine records relating to the lock of hair donated by Mr. and Mrs. Henry G. Burke in the late 1940s. I am indebted to another American, Elsa Solender, for recounting the conversation she had with Harry Burke before his death, about the testing of the hair for the presence of arsenic. Thanks also to Nancy Magnuson and her team at Goucher College, Baltimore, for searching the Burke archive on my behalf.

Michael Sanders, former consultant at St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, and a Chawton neighbor, took the trouble to investigate the prevailing medical theories about Jane Austen’s death and passed on insights from leading members of the medical profession, including Sir Richard Thompson, President of the Royal College of Physicians.

Thank you to my editor, Caroline Oakley, for rejecting several drafts of this book and challenging me to write something better. I’m grateful to all the staff at Honno for their unstinting support and to my mentor and great friend Janet Thomas, whose encouragement has played a crucial part in my writing.

I would also like to thank the staff at Sourcebooks for bringing the book to a wider audience.

Finally, huge thanks to my partner Steve Lawrence, without whom I would never have discovered Chawton, and to my children, for the nights they’ve had to spend in a house they swear is haunted.

Lindsay Ashford is an award-winning British mystery novelist and journalist. Her writing has been compared to that of Vivien Armstrong, Linda Fairstein, and Frances Fyfield. Raised in Wolverhampton, Ashford became the first woman to graduate from Queens’ College Cambridge in its 550-year history. She has a degree in criminology and, in 1996, began writing mysteries. Ashford divides her time between a home on the Welsh coast near Aberystwyth, Wales, and the village of Chawton (Jane Austen’s home) in Hampshire, England.