{"id":6429,"date":"2026-05-01T14:57:44","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T14:57:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=6429"},"modified":"2026-05-01T14:57:44","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T14:57:44","slug":"austen-retold-how-i-brought-murder-and-mayhem-to-jane-austens-emma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=6429","title":{"rendered":"Austen Retold: How I Brought Murder and Mayhem to Jane Austen\u2019s Emma"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Lucy Andrew discusses how she transformed Austen’s Harriet Smith into a feisty detective in her new novel <\/em>A Very Vexing Murder. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a huge fan of both Jane Austen and crime fiction, my urge to combine the two originated in my A-Level English homework, a co-written piece of Emma<\/em> fan fiction in which I explored the suspiciously convenient timing of Mrs Churchill\u2019s death, which allowed her nephew, Frank Churchill, to marry his secret fianc\u00e9e, Jane Fairfax, of whom his aunt would definitely have disapproved. Over twenty years later, I\u2019ve finally turned that germ of suspicion into a published novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Very Vexing Murder <\/em>is a cosy crime retelling of Jane Austen\u2019s Emma<\/em> which transforms Emma\u2019s mousy little sidekick, Harriet Smith, into a feisty-con-woman-turned detective who is hired to investigate a murder that hasn\u2019t yet been committed. Harriet is employed by the tyrannical Mrs Churchill to break off her nephew\u2019s secret engagement to Jane Fairfax who, she claims, is trying to kill her. Set in the Regency period and within the locations and narrative timeframes of Austen\u2019s Emma<\/em>, my work began by establishing how Harriet\u2019s story fits into Austen\u2019s narrative, in which she is a satellite of Emma Woodhouse\u2019s story. I had to make decisions about the key events, characters and locations from Austen\u2019s novel that I would be bringing into Harriet\u2019s narrative. I wanted to ensure that the skeleton of Emma<\/em> could be traced by Austen fans and that there were plenty of rewards for the reader who was familiar with Emma<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, as with every retelling, and particularly those that blend genres, I had to ensure that the novel worked as a detective narrative in its own right for readers without any knowledge of Austen\u2019s oeuvre. Emma<\/em>\u2019s status as a proto-detective novel, as discussed by P. D. James amongst others, certainly helped make my job easier. Emma<\/em> is full of secrets, scandals, misdirection and clues hidden in plain sight. There is no murder mystery, but there are plenty of marriage mysteries for the readers to solve (and for Emma herself to wilfully misinterpret). Harriet Smith may seem like an unlikely detective, but it was exactly for this reason that I selected her as my sleuthing heroine. Nobody expects anything from sweet, pliable Harriet and, so, like Christie\u2019s Miss Marple, she is perfectly placed to investigate. She is invisible, socially mobile and, seemingly, insignificant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Transformation is a key part of retellings. A retelling needs to do something new with the original novel: bring things from the margins to the centre; offer fresh perspectives; challenge dominant readings of the source text. In A Very Vexing Murder<\/em>, much of this work was done through my re-characterisation of Harriet Smith. Firstly, I wanted to respond to the prevailing representation of Harriet as a country bumpkin and na\u00efve little idiot that is perpetuated in many adaptations and retellings of Emma<\/em>. It\u2019s very easy to play Harriet for laughs, but she is not often given her due credit for having the courage, at last, to resist Emma\u2019s influence and trust her own instincts in deciding to marry Robert Martin. I don\u2019t think that Harriet is quite as silly as she\u2019s purported to be and so I wanted to come up with an alternative narrative which empowered Harriet and explained away her naivety \u2013 hence why, in my version, she is a con woman, playing the role of sweet little Harriet Smith in order to infiltrate Highbury society to do her job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also wanted to explore the class ambiguity surrounding Harriet as an illegitimate child of unknown parentage. There are huge gaps in Harriet\u2019s backstory \u2013 which Emma herself attempts to fill in Austen\u2019s narrative (erroneously, of course) \u2013 but I wanted to play with the idea of her class ambiguity. What if Harriet is<\/em> from good stock, but has fallen on hard times? Who are her parents and why have they abandoned her? Or why has she abandoned them? Connected to this, I wanted to explore the precarity of the protagonist\u2019s position and alternative roles that could be open to her through engaging in a profession, initially as a con-woman and then as a detective. In Emma<\/em>, the idea of a woman working is regarded as a terrible fate in the case of Jane Fairfax who, if she is unable to marry well, will have to go into the governess trade, which she compares to the slave trade. I wanted to challenge the narrative of tragedy surrounding the unmarried, working woman by tying Harriet\u2019s transformation into a detective to her moral growth and independence. And, through the transformation of Robert Martin into Harriet\u2019s gay best friend rather than her love interest, I wanted to challenge the heteronormativity of Austen\u2019s narratives by introducing a more diverse cast of characters and relationships, including male\/female platonic friendships, which are touched upon in Austen\u2019s novels, but are never centre stage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The best thing you can do with a retelling is to give your readers something that they didn\u2019t even know they wanted. In my case, that\u2019s murder most Austen and an unlikely detective heroine who is just the girl to solve it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Very Vexing Murder <\/a><\/em>is out now in the UK with Corvus (Atlantic Books) and will be published in the US with William Morrow (HarperCollins) on 12th<\/sup> May.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Lucy Andrew<\/strong>\u00a0<\/a>is a crime writer and crime fiction scholar who has an unhealthy fixation with Jane Austen. She has a PhD in English Literature from Cardiff University and was a Senior Lecturer in English Literature before leaving academia to concentrate on her writing. Her academic publications include The Boy Detective in Early British Children\u2019s Literature and edited collections Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes with Catherine Phelps and The Detective\u2019s Companion in Crime Fiction: A Study in Sidekicks with Samuel Saunders. You can find out more about her work at https:\/\/www.lucyandrew.com\/<\/a> and you can sign up for her Secret Sleuths Club here<\/a> to receive her latest author newsletter, plus an exclusive article, \u2018Five Ways Jane Austen Paved the Way for Golden-Age Detective Fiction\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can find Lucy on <\/strong>Instagram: <\/strong>@drlucyandrew<\/a>; X: <\/strong>@LucyVAndrew<\/a>; Facebook: <\/strong>Lucy Andrew<\/a>; Bluesky: <\/strong>@LucyVAndrew<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lucy Andrew discusses how she transformed Austen’s Harriet Smith into a feisty detective in her new novel A Very Vexing Murder. As a huge fan of both Jane Austen and… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6429"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6429"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6438,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6429\/revisions\/6438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}