Jane Austen’s Emma and the Rise of Detective Fiction
In this month’s Musing, Dr Lucy Andrew reveals the inspirations behind her debut novel, A Very Vexing Murder, which re-imagines Emma as a cosy crime in which Harriet Smith takes centre stage as a feisty-con-woman-turned detective.
Jane Austen is one of the most retold novelists of all time: Bridget Jones’s Diary, Clueless, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Death Comes to Pemberley, Longbourn, The Other Bennet Sister, to name but a few of the most successful examples. Austen retellings often draw out what is marginal or latent in the original works and provide critical readings and re-writings of the source texts. They can also fill in some of the gaps in the original texts, offer fresh perspectives on Austen’s novels and make the novels more comprehensible or relevant for contemporary audiences. My favourite retellings of Austen’s novels are those which move beyond the Austen heroine’s perspective and offer insights into the lives of her secondary characters, such as Natasha Farrant’s Lydia: The Wild Girl of Pride & Prejudice, Carrie Kablean’s What Kitty Did Next and Jo Baker’s Longbourn.
My debut novel, A Very Vexing Murder, the first book in the Harriet Smith Investigates series, is a cosy crime retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma which transforms the novel’s mousy little sidekick, Harriet Smith, into a feisty-con-woman-turned detective. Harriet is hired by the tyrannical Mrs Churchill to break off the secret engagement between her nephew, Frank Churchill, and his unsuitable fiancée, Jane Fairfax, who, she claims, is trying to kill her.
I wanted to respond to the dominant representation of Harriet Smith as a country bumpkin and naïve fool in the majority of Emma adaptations. It is very easy to play Harriet for laughs, but I feel that most adaptations and retellings don’t give Harriet her due credit for having the courage, at last, to resist Emma’s influence and trust her own instincts in deciding to marry Robert Martin. I wanted to come up with an alternative narrative which empowered Harriet and explained away her naivety – hence why, in my version, she is a con artist, playing the role of sweet little Harriet Smith in order to infiltrate Highbury society to do her job.
Transforming Harriet into a con-woman-turned-detective, enabled me to explore the precarity of the protagonist’s position and alternative roles that could be open to her through engaging in a profession. In Emma, 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’s transformation into a detective to her moral growth and independence.
Reimagining Harriet as a detective and Emma as a cosy crime novel wasn’t such a stretch as you might imagine. Several critics, including P.D. James, herself an author of an Austen detective retelling, have identified Emma as a detective novel of sorts. Emma has many of the elements of a classic Golden-Age detective mystery or a contemporary cosy crime novel: the focus on mystery, secrets, scandals and cover-ups; the closed community in which everyone is watching everyone else and the characters have clearly demarcated public and private selves; Austen’s Agatha Christie-like methods of misdirecting readers (the furore over Frank Churchill’s trip to London for a haircut diverts attention away from the real purpose of his visit), or concealing clues to the novel’s mysteries in plain sight – for example, by planting significant information in Miss Bates’s mundane monologues which characters and readers alike ignore. While Austen was writing several decades before the detective narrative emerged, she utilised many of the techniques that became common in the detective genre and, as such, I view Emma as a proto-detective novel.
Austen’s novels do not contain murder mysteries, but marriage mysteries. In the marriage mystery, rather than a dead body appearing in the opening chapters to disrupt the peace of the usually quiet, closed community, it is the appearance of a handsome stranger that causes chaos. With a corpse, the mystery that needs solving is ‘who murdered him’? With the eligible bachelor, it is ‘who will marry him?’ In Emma, the heroine, Emma Woodhouse, is determined to solve the novel’s marriage mysteries but, as she herself is rich and doesn’t need to marry, she lacks the motivation or insight to investigate effectively. She is a detective, but not a good one. Emma is much too elevated within the Highbury community to function successfully as a detective but Harriet has a level of invisibility and mobility which lends itself to investigative work. She can flit between the highest and the lowest members of Highbury society without anyone batting an eyelid. This made her the perfect heroine for my detective retelling of Emma.
While much of my research for book one in the series involved the study of Emma and detective fiction, I was also determined to immerse myself in Georgian culture as much as possible. Visits to Bath were instrumental to this process. Book two in the Harriet Smith Investigates series sees Harriet and her unwilling sidekick, Robert Martin, move into the world of Austen’s Northanger Abbey in Bath to investigate another murder. This prompted additional location research, including walking tours of Bath’s Georgian crescents and Jane Austen’s Bath, exploration of the Sydney Gardens grotto, breakfast at the Pump Room and a backstage tour of the Theatre Royal. In contrast to book one, which focuses predominantly on the fictional village of Highbury – a space reminiscent of Miss Marple’s St Mary Mead – book two engages with the much more public world of Bath and many of its real-life Georgian spaces, including the Theatre Royal, the Pump Room, the Upper Assembly Rooms and Sydney Gardens. As a kinaesthetic writer who likes to immerse myself in the world in which I’m writing, Bath has provided a rich array of creative opportunities. When I launched my book at Waterstones Bath in March, I was lucky enough to stay at 4 Sydney Place, Jane Austen’s residence in Bath from 1801-1805, which was a thrilling experience.
A Very Vexing Murder is out now in the UK with Corvus (Atlantic Books) and will be published by William Morrow (HarperCollins) in the US on 12th May 2026.
Lucy Andrew 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 at the University of Chester before leaving academia to concentrate on her writing. She lives in Wolverhampton with her husband and her septuagenarian tortoise. You can find out more about Lucy and her work on her website or join her Secret Sleuths Club.
