My Dear Charlotte: With the Assistance of Jane Austen's Letters

Hazel Holt has published 19 Mrs. Malory mysteries in the tradition of Barbara Pym and has admirers around the world. My Dear Charlotte is a departure from her other work. It is a novel-in-letters written with the assistance of Jane Austens letters. From the Introduction by Jan Fergus:My Dear Charlotte is a great British mystery set in the early 1800s and infused throughout with the actual language and style of Jane Austen one of the worlds great stylists and comic writers. Of course you dont have to love Austen to love this book. If you enjoy detective novels you will find here a completely satisfying murder mystery coupled with a romance (or more than one in fact). My Dear Charlotte gives you in addition to mystery and romance a portrait of the world of the English gentry at around 1815 immediately after the defeat of Napoleon-its manners and its moral certainty. As in Austen Napoleon is not directly mentioned but his shadow is there: one brother of the heroine is a sailor and the other a junior diplomat at the Congress of Vienna. Its the social world at home that is central however with its balls visits courtships gossip and of course murder underlining the tensions and rifts within that apparently civilized society.