I put the idea to the back of my mind until a few months later, when the library had a visitor from New York. She asked if I had seen the lock of Jane’s hair – cut off after her death as a keepsake - on display at the cottage down the road. Then she related the story of the couple who donated it – American collectors of Austen memorabilia, both now deceased, who had bought it at auction at Sotheby’s in 1948. ‘And did you know,’ she said, ‘that before they handed it over to the museum, they had it tested for arsenic?’
Alarm bells rang inside my head. The hair had tested positive for arsenic. So Jane Austen died with poison in her body. Why? How? The beginnings of a novel began to form. I already had plenty of research material for the book, provided by the Austen family archives housed in the library. Working in that room, knowing that Jane Austen herself had spent many hours reading and possibly writing in that same space, was an amazing experience. It brought the Austen family – the people I was writing about – to life in a way that felt very different to anything I’d worked on before. Sometimes it was as if I could hear voices whispering in my ear. That might sound outlandish but it’s the only way I can describe how the novel took me over.
I also did a lot of research about the use of arsenic in the early nineteenth century. I came across an excellent book called ‘The Arsenic Century’ by Professor James C. Whorton, which gives a fascinating insight into the use and misuse of arsenic at the time Jane Austen was alive. In 1817 – the year she died – arsenic was being used in everything from wallpaper to candy. The tasteless, odourless white powder was also used for rat poison and could be bought from any grocer’s shop in England with no questions asked. People were poisoned by accident if it got mistaken for baking powder. Could Jane have been poisoned in that way, or by some substance containing arsenic in the cottage where she lived? I ruled that out because she shared the house with her mother, her sister, and a family friend - all of whom outlived her by several decades. A second possibility was that she was given medicine containing arsenic for an illness that may not have killed her (arsenic was considered a ‘wonder drug’ at that time but was later proved to be therapeutically useless, as well as potentially lethal). The third possibility was that she was deliberately poisoned. Who would do such a thing? And why?
As I contemplated these questions I thought about Jane’s best friend, Anne Sharp, to whom the author wrote one of her last letters. Anne lived until 1853 – long enough to hear about the discovery of the Marsh Test. Developed in 1836, it enabled the analysis of human remains for the presence of arsenic. What would you do, I wondered, if you suspected your best friend had been poisoned and you were in possession of a lock of her hair?