Pemberley by P D James

Because Jane Austen is so wildly popular, several writers (though few as distinguished as P D James) have fallen in love with her characters and continued their stories.

Some of these sequels and spin-offs are good, and some disgraceful. In one, for instance, Mr Knightley turns into an unpleasant drunk and Emma has an adulterous affair with Frank Churchill. The late Joan Aiken wrote an interesting novel called Jane Fairfax, but then gave Austen’s fragment, The Watsons, an absurd melodramatic ending which included a fatal coach crash and a heroine accused of having poisoned her own father.

Can all this be justified? I think it can, provided the novels are not distorted (as in the wretched film of Mansfield Park) and provided that the characters’ basic personalities are not changed.

Janeites probably will not object to this sequel to Pride and Prejudice, even though P D James acknowledges that Jane Austen never wrote about murders. The main characters are as we know them, and it is very entertaining.

Darcy and Elizabeth are happily married, have two sons and live in comfort with their servants. There is more about the condition of England in this novel than in anything Jane Austen wrote. In those days the working classes could be hanged for poaching; women could be seduced by a ‘gentleman’ and left with an illegitimate child. Elizabeth worries that “outside there is another world which wealth and education and privilege can keep from us, a world in which men are as violent and destructive as is the animal world”.

Of course, they are a conscientious master and mistress, as all landowners will need to be if they are to avoid a French-style revolution. But the Darcys have some embarrassing relations. Their brother-in-law, George Wickham, fresh from putting down the 1798 Irish rising, is a national hero. It is hinted that this conflict may have brutalised him. When a minor character is murdered, not far from their front door, Wickham is the chief suspect and is in danger of being executed. Darcy, who sounds rather like Commander Adam Dalgliesh, must try to help a man he despises and to keep his family affairs private. More embarrassing facts about Wickham will be revealed near the end. In the last chapter, the Napoleonic wars are still going on, but the good characters are all happy. I didn’t guess the murderer, and was also puzzled by the role of Elizabeth’s scapegrace sister, Lydia.

She howls and moans a great deal but has no conversation, and it is not clear why no one asks her what was said between her husband and his friend, just before the shocking events in Pemberley woods.