“Okay, I'm thinking of a famous
novel, as to which ALL of the following statements are true. What is the title
of the novel, and what is the name of its author?”
As my Subject Line reveals, there
are two novels which fit all of my quiz clues, and they are Pride & Prejudice (P&P) by Jane
Austen, and A Murder is Announced (AMIA)
by Agatha Christie (and anyone who is concerned about SPOILERS as to who dun it
in Christie’s novel should stop at this point!)
I will first quickly dispose of the
three trick clues, which do not reveal any substantive connections between
these two novels, but which I included, to bring home that this quiz is about female
authors of the past who still matter to millions of readers, many of whom love
both of them!
There are no female English authors
more famous in 2015 than Jane Austen and Agatha Christie. Their respective
novels are indeed all famous and are as popular today as they have ever been.
And there were four film adaptations of P&P from 1940-2005, and three film adaptations of AMIA. Now for the substantive clues, which
do reveal a great deal of heretofore unrecognized connections between these two
novels:
“The entire arc of action in the
novel is triggered by an announcement of something surprising and intriguing
coming to the small country town where the main action takes place, an event that
gets all the local gossips speculating about it.”
ANSWER: In A
Murder is Announced, the action-triggering event is a mysterious personal
ad placed in the local Gazette, which reads as follows: “A
murder is announced … and will take place on Friday, October 29th, at Little
Paddocks at 6:30 p.m. Friends please accept this, the only intimation.”
In Pride & Prejudice, the action-triggering event is the arrival
in Meryton of Mr. Bingley, his sisters (& brother in law), and of course Mr.
Darcy. Are the following two related parallels
just a coincidence?:
Per the announcement in AMIA, the murder
occurs on Friday October 29 at (what becomes) a large social gathering, whereas
the Meryton assembly (where Darcy & Eliza first see each other) is a large social
gathering which occurs on Friday, October 18; AND
Per the announcement, it is “the ONLY
INTIMATION”, a very odd word for this context.
In P&P, the (literally) only (usage of the word) “intimation” occurs in
Chapter 43:
“Mrs. Reynolds respect for Elizabeth
seemed to increase on this INTIMATION of her knowing her master [Darcy]”.
“It has a character named Charlotte,
who turns out to be the mastermind who subtly manipulates many other characters
into doing what she wants, without its being traced back to her, and who is
believed to have schemed for an inheritance.”
ANSWER: In the shadow story of
P&P, CHARLOTTE Lucas (as first brilliantly
described by Kim Damstra, and later elaborated by myself) subtly manipulates
many other characters (most notably by tricking her sycophantic husband, Mr.
Collins, into passing the false rumor of Darcy and Elizabeth being engaged, on
to his idol, Lady Catherine de Bourgh), all with the goal (I claim) of provoking
Darcy & Eliza to actually marry, all for Charlotte’s deeper purpose---so that
Charlotte will wind up living close by her true but secret love, Eliza!
In AMIA, the murderer’s name is CHARLOTTE Blacklock, who commits several
murders, accomplished by cleverly manipulating several other characters, all in
order to protect her disguise as her late sister Leticia, whom she murdered in
order to impersonate her and thereby obtain a large inheritance.
“It has a character named Mrs.
Lucas.”
ANSWER: In P&P, Mrs. Lucas is obviously Charlotte
Lucas’s mother, mistress of the significant estate Lucas Lodge. In AMIA, Mrs. Lucas is the owner of a significant
estate near that of Blacklock residence.
“It presents a member of the Lucas
family as being involved with poultry in a home garden.”
ANSWER: In P&P, the following occurs at Hunsford while
Eliza is visiting Charlotte:“[Lady
Catherine] inquired into Charlotte's domestic concerns familiarly and minutely,
gave her a great deal of advice as to the management of them all; told her how
everything ought to be regulated in so small a family as hers, and instructed
her as to the care of her cows and her poultry.” And we repeatedly hear about Mr. Collins and
his oft-tended-to garden.
In AMIA, we hear several times about the garden at Dayas Hall, the Lucas
family estate, including its poultry.
“In a film made in the 21st
century, one of the main characters from this novel is shown or stated to be
lesbian, and that character is notably associated in the novel itself with
pigs.”
ANSWER: In The Jane Austen Book Club, we read the following exchange:
[Allegra, who is a lesbian] “What I
was thinking was that Charlotte Lucas might be gay. Remember when she says she’s
not romantic like Lizzie? Maybe that’s what she means. Maybe that’s why there’s
no point in holding out for a better offer.”
…”Are you saying Austen meant her to
be gay?” Sylvia asked. “Or that she’s gay and Austen doesn’t know it?”
Sylvia preferred the latter. There
was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her
author knew nothing about….”
And I myself have repeatedly brought
forward various textual evidence to support the depiction of Charlotte Lucas as
a lesbian in love as Jane Austen intentional authorial act.
In the 2005 Geraldine McEwan version
of AMIA (and, for that matter, in the 1986 version of AMIA as well), the two women who live with each other,
Misses Hinchcliffe and Murgatroyd, are depicted as out lesbians, whereas in the
novel, their relationship is never clearly stated to be gay or straight.
As for their respective textual associations
with pigs:
In P&P, we hear about pigs in the Hunsford garden here:
"Oh, my dear Eliza! pray make
haste and come into the dining-room, for there is such a sight to be seen! I
will not tell you what it is. Make haste, and come down this moment."
Elizabeth asked questions in vain;
Maria would tell her nothing more, and down they ran into the dining-room,
which fronted the lane, in quest of this wonder; It was two ladies stopping in
a low phaeton at the garden gate.
"And is this all?" cried
Elizabeth. "I expected at least that the PIGS were got into the GARDEN,
and here is nothing but Lady Catherine and her daughter."
In AMIA, there are, remarkably, nine
disconnected references to pigs, which seem to be random, but mostly have to do
with some sort of disruption or danger.
“There was widespread shock and
dismay expressed by many of the numerous lovers of this author and her novels,
when a film adaptation depicted a lesbian relationship.”
ANSWER: Indeed, many Janeites and
Christie fans have fiercely resisted the idea that there could be intended lesbian
characters in any of their novels.
But in that regard, note what Mathew
Prichard, Christie's grandson and the chairman of her estate, said about his
grandmother’s sly subtextual richness:
"Sometimes you can't always
stick rigidly to what she wrote. What she wanted to do was entertain and this
is very entertaining…It's an enormous compliment to her that people still want
to see these stories and different interpretations are like different
interpretations of Shakespeare….If you think my grandmother was not aware of
different sexual preferences, of course she was. If you read the books
carefully, it's all there. This is just more overt."
To which I reply “Bravo!” and add
that AMIA was first “outed” in print, as far as I can tell, by the fantasy
writer Marion Zimmer Bradley way back in 1960 (only ten years after AMIA was
published), as Bradley referred to Misses Hinchcliffe and Murgatroyd as “problematical
lesbians”.
And…it has also been pointed out in
online discussions of this lesbian subtext of AMIA that the live-in relationship
between Hinchcliffe and Murgatroyd is not the only woman-woman cohabitation in
AMIA — it is also the case with Charlotte (pretending to be Letitia) Blacklock
and Dora “Bunny” Buner. And how striking, then, that it is Charlotte Blacklock
who murders both Miss Murgatroyd and Bunny, thereby ending both of these de
facto lesbian “marriages”.
Speaking of lesbian “marriages”, I
believe Agatha Christie was hinting at this in the following comic exchange in
Chapter One of AMIA, when we first read the announcement:
“Mrs. Swettenham was once more deep
in the Personal Column.
“Second hand Motor Mower for sale.
Now I wonder … Goodness, what a price!… More dachshunds … ‘Do write or
communicate desperate Woggles.’ What silly nicknames people have … Cocker
Spaniels … Do you remember darling Susie, Edmund? She really was human.
Understood every word you said to her … Sheraton sideboard for sale. Genuine
family antique. Mrs. Lucas, Dayas Hall … What a liar that woman is! Sheraton
indeed …!”
Mrs. Swettenham sniffed and then
continued her reading:
“All a mistake, darling. Undying
love. Friday as usual.—J … I suppose they’ve had a lovers’ quarrel—or do you
think it’s a code for burglars?… More dachshunds! Really, I do think people
have gone a little crazy about breeding dachshunds. I mean, there are other
dogs. Your Uncle Simon used to breed Manchester Terriers. Such graceful little
things. I do like dogs with legs … Lady going abroad will sell her navy two
piece suiting … no measurements or price given … A marriage is announced—no, a
murder. What? Well, I never! Edmund, Edmund, listen to this….
A murder is announced and will take
place on Friday, October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6:30 p.m. Friends please
accept this, the only intimation.
What an extraordinary thing!
Edmund!”
“What’s that?” Edmund looked up from
his newspaper.”
Notice that Mrs. Swettenham (who sounds
like a latter-day Mrs. Bennet!) first misreads it as “A MARRIAGE is announced”
and then realizes it says “murder” not “marriage”---I believe this is Christie’s
game of misdirection, planting the seed in the reader’s mind that this novel is
going to be a kind of announcement—in the form of a veiled intimation, if you
will- of marriages of a different sort than Christie’s mostly heterosexual
readers would expect to see in one of her novels. It’s what we would today call
taking the forbidden topic of lesbianism out of the closet, and it’s remarkable
for 1950.
So, does anyone reading the above
believe this is all just coincidence and wild conjecture?
Before you double down in such a
reaction, realize that I also wrote two consecutive posts last year about the
allusion to Pride & Prejudice that
I had sleuthed out in the first Miss Marple novel, Murder at the Vicarage:
It does not take a Miss Marple to
ascertain from all of the above that I believe it’s no coincidence at all that I
have now happened upon a second Miss
Marple novel--written two decades after the first---which also has the word
“Murder” in its title (no big shocker there, I agree) but which also has Pride & Prejudice up the wazoo in
its subtext!
And what I love most, and find most interesting,
about this is that Christie, when writing AMIA, at age 60 and at the peak of
her writing skill and popularity, chose to use her bully pulpit for good, by focusing
her veiled allusion to P&P in the mysterious, enigmatic character of
Charlotte Lucas depicted as a lesbian. It means that Agatha Christie, in 1950, understood
Jane Austen’s intent to create a complex lesbian character in Charlotte Lucas,
and that ought to be big news, I think, in both Austen and Christie circles.
And finally, this is what unites
many readers in a love of both Jane Austen and Agatha Christie. Miss Marple
explains it best when she makes one of her famous faux-modest comments about her
own homespun psychology in AMIA:
“I’m afraid you’ve been listening to
Sir Henry. Sir Henry is always too kind. He thinks too much of any little
observations I may have made in the past. Really, I have no gifts—no gifts at
all—except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature. People, I find, are apt
to be far too trustful. I’m afraid that I have a tendency always to believe the
worst. Not a nice trait. But so often justified by subsequent events.”
I think that Agatha Christie, behind
the mask of being a “mere” writer of commercially successful whodunits, was
actually also a subtle “studier of character” who emulated the two writers who taught
her the most in this regard—Jane Austen and William Shakespeare, both of whom
were supreme geniuses as to human nature. And speaking of Shakespeare, it is
therefore no accident at all that we read the following passage in AMIA, about Phillipa
Haymes, looking a lot like Eliza Bennet after her famous muddy walk to Netherfield,
reminding Craddock of Rosalind, Shakespeare’s witty cross-dresser:
“And sure enough in the apple
orchard Craddock found Phillipa Haymes. His first view was a pair of nice legs
encased in breeches sliding easily down the trunk of a tree. Then Phillipa, her
face flushed, her fair hair ruffled by the branches, stood looking at him in a
startled fashion.
“Make a good Rosalind,” Craddock
thought automatically, for Detective-Inspector Craddock was a Shakespeare
enthusiast and had played the part of the melancholy Jaques with great success
in a performance of As You Like It for the Police Orphanage.
A moment later he amended his views.
Phillipa Haymes was too wooden for Rosalind, her fairness and her impassivity
were intensely English, but English of the twentieth rather than of the
sixteenth century. Well-bred, unemotional English, without a spark of mischief.”
I see many sparks of Christiean
mischief flying out of that “well-bred, unemotional English” passage. I will
leave it at that, for your consideration, with the promise to return with a
followup after I receive (hopefully) some interesting responses.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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