Darkness in the background

The initial reaction to this solid little book must be ‘Oh no, not another!’ As Claire Tomalin says on the jacket, ‘A new approach seemed impossible.’ But ‘Susannah Fuller- ton, the President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, has brilliantly hit on one.’

Her theme is crime and punishment and it has yielded up a parallel world to the novels that Jane Austen was very much aware of, lurking around the margins of ‘the two inches of ivory and fine brush’ she used for the tiny events of Georgian family life.

Fullerton early became interested in the connections of the Austen family to Australia, as others have done: there is even the novel imagining Jane Austen living there. John Knatchbull, a connection by marriage, was deported in 1828 for murder, began another life of crime, and was hanged for a second murder in Sydney. And Australia lies frighteningly in the background of Mrs Austen’s sister-in-law’s trial for grand larceny in Bath, the alleged theft of some lace from a haberdasher’s threatening either hanging or transportation. For eight months she awaited trial in Ilchester jail, Mrs Austen offering her daughters as companions, which offer was refused (the relief must have been great. Fullerton suggests that the squalid chaos of family life in Portsmouth in Mansfield Park may owe something to Ilchester) and Mrs Leigh Perrot prepared her case — and got off. But it seems that there was a family tradition that Aunt Jane was a kleptomaniac and Fullerton has noticed that the letters from her husband after she is released beg his wife to be careful not to go about alone. Australia was a real possibility.

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Jane Austen herself was fascinated from a child by crime, particularly murder and suicide, which as the Christian daughter of a clergyman she knew to be the gravest sins; but from childhood too she had a gallows humour that did not change with age.