But, to show the closeness of the married couple’s relationship, James has Elizabeth address her husband as “Fitzwilliam” during a conversation.Īs a result, in Death Comes to Pemberley, the other cousin must always called Colonel Fitzwilliam or simply the Colonel. Austen didn’t have much of a problem with that since Darcy was always called Darcy. On the technical level of writing, she encountered a minor problem in the fact that two of the characters - Darcy and his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam - are named Fitzwilliam. There are demands on both sides that need to be met, and that ain’t always easy.įor instance, James has to start with a set of characters whom she did not create. The thing is that melding Austen’s world of social jockeying, clearly delineated rules of manner and strict class gradations with James’s world of bloody murder and painstaking detection is more than a bit awkward. Indeed, I think that someone with no previous knowledge of James’s books or of Austen’s would also find it enjoyable. Let me quickly say here that the novel is a fun, engaging read, especially for fans of Austen and fans of James. She wanted, in my view, to publish it anyway because she was a fan. She may have waited until the end of her career because she knew that many, many fans of Pride and Prejudice have very definite opinions about the characters, particularly the brooding Darcy, and that anyone venturing onto Austen’s turf was running the risk of ticking off a whole lot of readers.Īlso, because, I think, James recognized that Death Comes to Pemberley isn’t great James nor is it great Austen. My suspicion is that the James book may have been written earlier, even decades earlier, and only trotted out at the end of her life because, well, she wanted to pay her homage before dying. (In addition, it gave her a chance in passing references to link the world of Pemberley to people from two other Austen novels Emma and Persuasion.) It not only gave such characters as Elizabeth and Darcy (and Lydia and Wickham and others) additional life beyond the end of the Austen novel, published 198 years earlier, but also brought them into James’s own fictional world. Her celebration of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was, it seems to me, an important book to her. Three years earlier, the 14 th and last of her Adam Dalgliesh mysteries, The Private Patient, had arrived in bookstores. James was in her 91 st year when, in 2011, she published Death Comes to Pemberley, her final book.
I’d suggest, though, that, even more, it’s high-toned fan fiction. James is a pastiche inasmuch as it’s a literary work, written in the style of another author, in this case, Jane Austen, that celebrates Austen’s art. Technically, Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D.
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