Okay, I admit it. Although as a general rule I hold to the perhaps snooty belief that people who lived and wrote and published in the past should be left to enjoy the characters they created while the rest of us think up our own (and that despite my own appropriation of Baroness Orczy’s Sir Percy Blakeney and his associates), I can be as enthusiastic as anyone when a modern-day author dives into a well-known novel or series and makes it her own. And just as I loved Christina Dodd’s take on Romeo, Juliet, and their not-created-by-Shakespeare eldest daughter, Rosie, a few weeks back, I found myself equally caught up in Vanessa Kelly’s transformation of Jane Austen’s Emma Knightley into an amateur detective. That choice anchors Kelly’s Murder in Highbury, the subject of my latest New Books Network interview. Read on to find out why.
As usual, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.
For a woman who published only four novels during her lifetime, with two others appearing shortly after her death and several incomplete or shorter works released into print much later, Jane Austen has had an astonishing and enduring legacy, with spinoffs, sequels, prequels, and remakes galore. Vanessa Kelly’s Murder in Highbury (Kensington Books, 2024), the first in a murder mystery series based on Austen’s Emma, offers one particularly appealing example.
As happens in the best of these adaptations, Kelly’s Emma Woodhouse—now Emma Knightley—shares basic personality traits with her original conception but is not constrained by them. Stumbling into an impossible-to-predict encounter with a dead body in the chancel of the local church, Emma keeps her head even as her companion, Harriet Martin, seems ready to faint at the horrible sight. Emma confirms the victim’s death, settles her friend down, then sends her off to find the village doctor/coroner and George Knightly, Emma’s husband and the local magistrate. Emma herself waits behind in the church in case the vicar should pop in and discover his wife lying on the floor with bruises around her neck and her head bashed in. Hearing a noise, she goes to investigate (chiding herself for impetuousness), and even before her husband arrives, she has discovered evidence of murder.
But whodunnit? The residents of Highbury, not to mention the victim and her relatives, display the usual array of problems, lies, misdirections, and motives. The whole is handled with a light touch and a regard for Regency language and deportment, as well as for Austen’s original, that make it a delightful read.
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