The Mysterious Death of Miss Jane Austen
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I am grateful to Tom Carpenter and Louise West of Jane Austen’s House Museum for allowing me to examine records relating to the lock of hair donated by Mr. and Mrs. Henry G. Burke in the late 1940s. I am indebted to another American, Elsa Solender, for recounting the conversation she had with Harry Burke before his death, about the testing of the hair for the presence of arsenic. Thanks also to Nancy Magnuson and her team at Goucher College, Baltimore, for searching the Burke archive on my behalf.
Michael Sanders, former consultant at St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, and a Chawton neighbor, took the trouble to investigate the prevailing medical theories about Jane Austen’s death and passed on insights from leading members of the medical profession, including Sir Richard Thompson, President of the Royal College of Physicians.
Thank you to my editor, Caroline Oakley, for rejecting several drafts of this book and challenging me to write something better. I’m grateful to all the staff at Honno for their unstinting support and to my mentor and great friend Janet Thomas, whose encouragement has played a crucial part in my writing.
I would also like to thank the staff at Sourcebooks for bringing the book to a wider audience.
Finally, huge thanks to my partner Steve Lawrence, without whom I would never have discovered Chawton, and to my children, for the nights they’ve had to spend in a house they swear is haunted.
About the Author
Lindsay Ashford is an award-winning British mystery novelist and journalist. Her writing has been compared to that of Vivien Armstrong, Linda Fairstein, and Frances Fyfield. Raised in Wolverhampton, Ashford became the first woman to graduate from Queens’ College Cambridge in its 550-year history. She has a degree in criminology and, in 1996, began writing mysteries. Ashford divides her time between a home on the Welsh coast near Aberystwyth, Wales, and the village of Chawton (Jane Austen’s home) in Hampshire, England.