Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas by Stephanie Barron
A mystery book review
Jane Austen wrote seven novels, several of them masterpieces, before her death in 1817 at age 41. Though her novels received favorable reviews and sold well during her lifetime, she would surely have been gratified, perhaps even astounded, to realize how enduringly popular they have remained 200 years after she personally departed the scene. Though Austen will never write another novel, numerous fans of hers have tried their hand at her style with varying degrees of success.
Stephanie Barron is one of the best of the neo-Jane-Austen novelists. Rather than borrowing Austen’s characters and fashioning new adventures for them, Barron imagines Jane herself as an amateur sleuth tracking down murderers amid the decorously hypocritical society of Regency England. Barron’s Jane is sharply aware of the flaws and foibles in her circles of family and acquaintance. Compassionate with the vulnerable, whether young or elderly, she is as quick with a cutting, left-handed compliment to their oppressors as any of Austen’s heroines. The Jane Austen mystery series is delicious consolation to readers longing for more Austen novels.
In Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas, the shabby-genteel single and widowed ladies in Jane’s family accept an unexpected holiday invitation from a member of the gentry after the cart Jane’s stingy brother has sent to collect them overturns in a snowstorm at dusk. They join a collection of characters gathered at the Vyne for Christmas: country gentleman William Chute and his wife; Chute’s dandyish brother; an admiral’s wife and her niece and nephew; the son of noted artist Benjamin West; and the large Austen clan. Each of the characters is so distinctively drawn that readers will have no trouble keeping track of them, despite their number. And the witty mockery of the more selfish and snobbish of them will keep readers turning pages even though no murder occurs until almost a third of the way through.
Barron has done her research. Christmas customs and changing mores that spark family conflict around them are seamlessly woven into the story, from the game of Snapdragon in which contestants vie to pull raisins out of a flaming Christmas pudding, to the Twelfth Night Children’s Ball at which “Lady Candour” reveals the killer’s identity. Readers interested in the Regency period will find much to delight them. (2014, 327 pages including an Afterword with notes on the history behind the fiction)