Murder at Mansfield Park

Acknowledgments

My first and greatest debt is, of course, to Jane Austen herself — not just her wonderful novels, but her letters as well, which I have both mimicked and mined in an effort to recreate her characteristic combination of elegant turns of phrase and delightfully ruthless observations. As a lifelong fan of her work I’ve tried to remain faithful both to the spirit of her writing, and the actual language she used — I’d like to think that if she’d turned her hand to murder it might just have turned out something like this.

Some readers will also have recognised the deliberate reference to Kingsley Amis’s famous condemnation of the original Fanny Price as "a monster of complacency and pride, who under a cloak of cringing self-abasement, dominates and gives meaning to the novel". This comes from an article originally published in The Spectator in October 1957, entitled "What became of Jane Austen?"

Finally, I’d like to thank my husband Simon for all his support, and my agent, Ben Mason, for everything he did to make this happen — without him, it would never have been published at all.