by Hazel Holt
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design by Sabrina Sun
My Dear Charlotte
Copyright © 2009 by Hazel Holt
ISBN: 978-1-60381-042-5 (ePub)
Author’s Note
When I began to write a mystery story set in the early 1800s in the form of a series of letters, I thought a splendid way to give it authenticity might be to interweave those of my heroine with the letters written by Jane Austen. Fully aware that this was a truly presumptuous thing to do, nevertheless I have plundered that treasure house – a most enjoyable occupation.
I hope the result will give those of my readers who already know the Austen letters the pleasure of recognition and, those who do not, the delight of discovery.
Someone once said that writing pastiche was like being lent an expensive and powerful motor car, which is thrilling to drive, but you’re terrified of breaking it. I do hope I have returned this particular, wonderful vehicle in relatively pristine condition.
I have used the Brabourne Edition of the Letters, published in 1884 and dedicated to Queen Victoria, who was a great Jane Austen fan.
Introduction
Hazel Holt has many devoted fans in the United States and Great Britain as a writer of “cosy” British mysteries; she has published nineteen Mrs. Malory novels at last count. She is also known to admirers of Barbara Pym as the friend and biographer who additionally edited Pym’s posthumous works. This background of talent and expertise along with a deep appreciation of Jane Austen’s novels and letters allows Holt to do what no one to my knowledge has attempted. She writes, as the title page announces, “with the assistance of Jane Austen’s letters.” That is, Holt brings together the style of the letters with a cast of characters that would be at home in Austen’s novels, creating a work that offers pleasures that are the next best to those that an Austen novel affords.
Of course, you don’t have to love Austen to love this book. If you enjoy detective novels, you will find here a completely satisfying murder mystery, coupled with a romance (or more than one, in fact). My Dear Charlotte gives you, in addition to mystery and romance, a portrait of the world of the English gentry at around 1815, immediately after the defeat of Napoleon—its manners and its moral certainty. As in Austen, Napoleon is not directly mentioned, but his shadow is there: one brother of the heroine is a sailor and the other a junior diplomat at the Congress of Vienna. It’s the social world at home that is central, however, with its balls, visits, courtships, gossip, and of course murder, underlining the tensions and rifts within that apparently civilized society.
But it’s readers of Jane Austen who will get the most pleasure from My Dear Charlotte. It is in my opinion the only successful attempt to re-create the world of Austen’s novels, better even than the best of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances. Holt does much more, though: she has chosen to write a novel-in-letters, which allows her to incorporate witty quotations directly from Austen’s letters into her novel, quotations about persons, occasions, the minutiae of daily life from housekeeping and shopping to the weather and human nature. Austen’s comments take new meaning when they are thus placed in the context of this novel, in ways that I will hope to illustrate more fully later. Even without an added context, they can seem richer here, as in the following (taken from the 19th-century Brabourne edition of the letters):
The masons are now repairing the chimney, which they found to be in such a state as to make it wonderful that it should have stood so long, and next to impossible that another violent wind should not blow it down. (MDC 29 Oct; JA Letters 7 Oct. 1808)
Seeing this line as a paragraph to itself, I finally appreciated its perfect evocation of the doom-laden pronouncements of repairmen, shaking their heads over the dismal condition of our fabric (“wonderful it should have stood so long”) and over the heroic exertions they must undertake to save us before something like “another violent wind” occurs to our destruction. That is, Holt first of all makes the complicated ironies of Austen’s letters more available to readers by taking them out of their original context and allowing us to focus on them.
What is even more important, however, is that the inclusion of such comments from Austen’s letters dictates style. Unless you know those letters really well, you will simply not detect all of the quotations in My Dear Charlotte. The insertions are seamless because, astonishingly, Holt captures their tone and wit and language, their style, in fifty-five letters from her heroine Elinor Cowper (pronounced Cooper) to her sister, “My Dear Charlotte,” over about seven months. And, as in Austen, style is character. Elinor has the qualities of Austen in the letters, an inquisitive, sharp, ironical eye that she turns on everything in her world—dress, food, family life, and in Elinor’s case, murder. But because she is a character in a story, enmeshed in plot, she is more knowable than Jane Austen and more familiar. We inevitably read her through our understanding of Austen’s characters, and as the novel progresses, Elinor the letter writer (or narrator) sounds more and more like Elizabeth Bennet, with the occasional dash of Mary Crawford’s superior bitchiness. Her irony doesn’t, then, have the “godlike impersonality” that some scholars attribute to Austen’s narrators.1 Instead, all Elinor writes reveals character, her own or others’, even when she is producing sentences from Austen’s letters. As an example, the line about the masons repairing the chimney shows Elinor’s relish for the human foibles that lubricate society, keep it going—in this case, both the masons’ enjoyment of the power their expertise gives them, stretching to exaggeration of danger, and also our own helpless and probably ignorant reliance on that expertise.
Often, the quotations from Austen’s letters are placed firmly in the context of the mystery plot and do service there. After rejecting the idea that “chicken and asparagus fricassee” could have caused a suspicious death in another household, Elinor wonders what should be served to the magistrate at dinner:
. . . perhaps we should settle on having a plain roasted bird when Sir Edward comes to dine since any possible threat to a magistrate might put us in danger of the law.
Our mother said that Mr Russell looked remarkably well – legacies are a very wholesome diet.… (MDC 26 July).
Austen’s witty “legacies are a very wholesome diet”—pointing out how we selfishly thrive on what allegedly should grieve us—becomes even wittier in the context of genuine but also slightly absurd concern over what to feed the magistrate. The majesty of the law is thus mocked by appearing to preside over the wholesomeness of a dinner instead of inquiring into a possibly ill-gotten legacy. The reference to a chicken and asparagus fricassee will also make readers of Emma recall the “delicate fricassee of sweetbread and some asparagus,”2 a favorite dish snatched away from poor Mrs. Bates by Mr. Woodhouse’s concern for his own health. This subtle allusion to Austen’s novel ties together the selfishness that can underlie hospitality with the selfishness of inheritance—not a “wholesome diet” at all.
As is evident, the pleasures of My Dear Charlotte, are increased the more one knows not just Austen’s letters but her biography and the novels as well, particularly Emma. Those who know the biography will enjoy finding parallels and contrasts between Elinor and Austen herself, and be
tween their sisters Charlotte and Cassandra. One of my favorite instances occurs when Elinor is describing to Charlotte the contents of a cupboard she had to empty. Among other childhood treasures, Elinor finds “the book of pressed ferns that occupied so much of your time until you wearied of it and turned your attention to collecting riddles” (MDC 16 Aug.). That Charlotte, who is more sedate and proper than Elinor and also a bit of a hypochondriac, should have collected riddles like Emma’s Harriet Smith is perfect—and that Elinor should enjoy this slight jab at her beloved sister’s pastimes reveals their real intimacy. While we know nothing of Cassandra Austen’s pastimes other than her drawing, this line encourages me to reread Austen’s letters for signs that she too has a sister who complains perhaps overmuch.
Though allusions to Emma are the most evident, it is of course not the only Austen novel that events and comments and characters and sometimes even passages in My Dear Charlotte, evoke. Persuasion is important also. The town closest to Elinor’s home is Lyme, after all. Elinor’s slightly hypochondriacal sister Charlotte is outdone by their married sister Mary who, as Elinor reports, “has had one of her bad throats this last month or more and, as we are aware, her throats are always worse than anyone’s” (MDC 25 June): the whining Mary Musgrove of Persuasion is with us here almost word for word (see the postscript to Mary Musgrove’s letter, p. 164), and whining is a constant thread in My Dear Charlotte as a whole. But Holt manages to allude to Persuasion through just one word in the following passage—which doesn’t at all quote Austen’s letters—while also skewering various characters as well as the society that shapes them:
Poor Miss Craven and her mama must have been sadly disappointed. Without Mrs Woodstock’s eye upon him, Mr Russell exchanged the merest civilities with them and made his escape as soon as he decently could. But Miss Craven may still find a husband. She is, for the most part, silent and not ill-looking if one can overlook her freckles, and I am sure that may easily be done by contemplation of her fortune, so I shall not feel sorry for her. (MDC 26 Aug.)
It’s the word “freckles” that brings in Mrs. Clay of Persuasion and Sir Walter Elliot’s delusions about them—first that her freckles are impossible to overlook, rendering Mrs. Clay hopelessly unattractive, and second that they have been erased by his recommendation of Gowland’s lotion. Mrs. Clay has no fortune to make her freckles vanish—whereas, in the society of Persuasion and My Dear Charlotte, fortune makes any woman able to find a husband, especially a woman who, tellingly, is “silent” and “not ill-looking.” In this world, such a woman’s fortune nicely alliterates with and cancels out her freckles. Though we never learn the precise amount of Elinor’s fortune (or that of Charlotte), nor indeed what she looks like (though she is evidently attractive), we discover that her father’s estate of Monkton near Lyme is worth £2000 a year (MDC 5 Nov.)—an essential detail in the world of My Dear Charlotte, as in any of the Austen novels.
One final instance of the rich and complex relation between this novel and Austen’s: Elinor thus reports her mother’s rhapsodies on Mr. Rivers—
“Why, when Mrs Brompton was laid up with a cold he went all the way to Exeter to procure some special wool she needed to complete a carpet she was making. And when he dined with us he was able to converse easily with Mr Mildmay, who is quite deaf and needs a good deal of trouble to make him hear – a great problem on such occasions, and I have often said to Mr Cowper that only the fact that he is one of our oldest friends persuades me to invite him! No, Mr Rivers is a splendid addition to our society and I for one will be very sorry to see him go back to Barbados.” MDC 19 Sept.)
Character is finely rendered here. Mrs. Cowper is a little like Miss Bates in her loquacity and sometimes even like Mrs. Bennet her bare-faced manipulativeness. In this instance, the good-hearted, open tone of Miss Bates’s voice seems to prevail, but it is possible that when we arrive at “a great problem” and “I have often said to Mr Cowper” we can hear in our minds something of the fretfulness of Mrs. Bennet. That is, when dialogue is reported, as here, the tone remains ambiguous, like the tone of Darcy’s remarks to Elizabeth in the first volume of Pride and Prejudice: on first reading, we are likely to hear that tone as haughty, as Elizabeth does; on subsequent readings, we may hear the same words as more friendly, more interested, more attracted. Holt’s dialogue in this novel has some of that same Austenian ambiguity, inviting rereading.
Comedy is also finely rendered in this passage. What is delightful here is the way that Mrs. Cowper reveals that she herself is the gold standard of politeness: only because Mr. Mildmay is such an old friend will she invite him, so that Mr. Rivers’ civility elevates him to her own moral high ground. In this passage, the moral certainty of Mrs. Cowper is treated comically, but the social world described is one in which such judgments are constantly made, with a freedom that seems alien in our own world. Not that such judgments are necessarily correct. Here, as in Austen’s novels, sometimes even the most confident judges, proud of their discernment, like Elizabeth Bennet or indeed like Elinor Cowper, make mistakes.
In these passages and just about any others chosen at random from My Dear Charlotte, readers can appreciate how far Holt’s choice to base her novel on Austen’s letters dictates its tone, wit, and language, and how far her choice to mine Austen’s novels to provide paradigms for characters, courtships, and moral qualities, dictates its overall comedy. To all this, Holt adds a murder mystery, used (as is traditional) to underline the inequity that the social world is partly based upon, however many admirable individuals populate it. Holt depicts this class-based historical community without nostalgia. Though the main characters are of the gentry, all the classes are there and shown to be interdependent. The relations among the classes, how they each affect one another, are carefully sketched, but the murder and some of the unpleasant characters indicate a fundamental corruption that precludes a nostalgic presentation of community, of the world we have lost.
Because readers will enjoy finding their own parallels to the novels and to Austen’s own family, as well as their own favorite comic moments, I have been sparing in my examples. I have also tried to avoid spoiling the various plots by giving too many details. With great confidence, I recommend to you the pleasures of reading and rereading My Dear Charlotte.
Jan Fergus
Professor of English Emerita, Lehigh University
Principal Characters
Residing at Lyme Regis:
Henry Cowper, gentleman (pronounced “Cooper”)
Mrs. Cowper, his wife
Charlotte Cowper, their elder daughter, away on visits
Elinor Cowper, their younger daughter, letter writer
Frank Cowper, their son, in Vienna with the diplomatic corps
William Cowper, their son, on duty with the Royal Navy
Susan, maidservant to the Cowpers and sister to Sarah, housekeeper at Holcombe Park
Mrs. and Miss Caroline West, new residents at Chilton House by the Cobb, Lyme
Maria Brompton and Mrs. Holder, who know all that goes on in and around Lyme
Rugeley’s book shop and Layton’s haberdashery, where Lyme residents often call at Holcombe Park:
Mr. Woodstock, gentleman
Mrs. Woodstock, invalid
Sir Matthew Russell, Mrs. Woodstock’s brother, an eminent physician
Mr. James Russell, Mrs. Woodstock’s nephew, and nephew to Sir Matthew Russell, on a visit from London
Mr. Frederick Rivers, Mr. Woodstock’s cousin and estate manager in Barbados, on a visit
Corbett, Mr. James Russell’s valet
Chapman, Mrs. Woodstock’s maid
Sarah, Mrs. Woodstock’s housekeeper
at Marshwood Abbey:
Sir Edward Hampton of Hatch Beauchamp and Marshwood Abbey, justice of the peace
George and John Hampton, his young sons
Miss Blair, their governess
Mrs. Hodges, housekeeper to Sir Edward
Monkton
May
12th
My Dear Charlotte,
Your letter this morning was quite unexpected and disappointed me of my first sentence which I had planned, full of proper hopes about your journey. I was sorry to hear that your trunk was too heavy to go by the coach from Taunton, but you were fortunate to find a wagon that could convey it all the way to Bath. I do indeed hope that you may not have taken cold after your stop at Shepton Mallet, but I have often found the brief introduction of a warming pan into cold sheets does provoke the feeling of dampness without the actual ill effects.
I am glad that our uncle has settled on a house in Green Park Buildings since the one that he and our aunt took last year in New King Street had pitifully small rooms. You may remember that the best of the sitting rooms was not as large as our parlour here. Those at G.P. Buildings are quite spacious and dry since I believe that no inconvenience from the river may be felt there. So I shall think of you happily established with a fire in your room and every kind of comfort about you.