The Matters at Mansfield (Or, The Crawford Affair) by Carrie Bebris – review

Jane Austen fans and mystery lovers, rejoice! Author Carrie Bebris continues her Mr. & Mrs. Darcy Mystery series with her fourth novel about these two beloved Jane Austen characters from Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy. Titled The Matters at Mansfield (Or, The Crawford Affair), it is another mystery set in Regency era England, two summers after Elizabeth and her husband wed. Henry Crawford of Everingham in Norfolk, the charismatic cad of Austen’s Mansfield Park, is reviled by just about everyone in town. The question is not who has a motive to wish him dead, but who actually tries to carry that wish out.

At a house party of one of Mr. Darcy’s relatives, Elizabeth notices that Anne appears to want to come out of her shell but can’t as long as her overbearing mother Lady Catherine de Bourgh is there watching her. So Elizabeth suggests to her husband to keep Lady Catherine occupied playing a card game in another room. Fitzwilliam Darcy really doesn’t want to spend time with the odious woman, but he agrees to do as Elizabeth asks, leaving Anne free to dance with Colonel Fitzwilliam. The dance involves switching partners, so at one point for a short while, she dances with Mr. Crawford.

Lady Catherine brokers a marriage between Anne and the son of a family friend and neighbor, purely a match of convenience and made without Anne’s knowledge. Neville is not a pleasant person (he has been seen by Mr. Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam to beat his dogs and horse), and to avoid marriage to him Anne makes an uncharacteristically bold move and elopes with a man unknown to her family or friends—namely,  Mr. Crawford. Lady Catherine blames Elizabeth for encouraging Anne to elope with Mr. Crawford, while Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam go after the couple.  They are too late to stop the marriage, so all they can do is escort the couple back to Riverton Hall for an audience with her Ladyship. They are detained for a couple of weeks in a country village quite familiar to Henry Crawford, Mansfield Park, when Anne’s leg is hurt in a carriage accident. It’s the last village in England where he would like to be stranded, because the locals know of Mr. Crawford’s past romantic exploits. While stranded there, he must deal with the villagers and many of the characters in Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park such as Sir Thomas Bertram, Mrs. Norris, and his former paramour, the spiteful Maria Rushworth. Are his plans for Anne the same, to love her and leave her, or has he really turned over a new leaf?

One of the aspects about Jane Austen’s novels that I don’t particularly like, which is also prevalent in this novel, is high society’s concerns with appearances and marrying the right type of person. One example is Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who is the type of character you love to hate. She’s extremely rich and watches over Anne, who is now 28, like a hawk, not wanting to let her out of her sight for fear she’ll either overexert herself and get ill, or that she might dare to try to have a life and do things that Lady Catherine does not know about, be out of her control, and do something foolish like fall in love with a man Lady Catherine does not approve of and ruin her schemes for Anne to marry a rich aristocrat. Everything seems to revolve around balls and dances, and their importance in getting eligible women and men of marrying age in the spotlight, like they were commodities. I know that this was relatively commonplace back then, at least in Austen’s social circles, but for a long time (decades) I was turned off to wanting to read any of her novels, just because I thought they were only concerned with what happened in the lives of the ultra-rich.  When my daughter had to read Pride & Prejudice in high school, though, I decided to also give it another chance. That’s when I became aware of the sly humor underlying much of what Austen writes, and the brilliant intellect and insight into her characters that she displays throughout her writing. I went from despising Austen’s novels, without really having given them much of a chance, to liking at least one of them a great deal.

I confess I still have not read any of Jane Austen’s novels except for Pride and Prejudice, but I really enjoyed reading it and liked Austen’s understated and witty humor.  It’s humor which to me hasn’t really been brought out in the various movies made from her novels, which is a shame. Author Carrie Barrie, IMHO, does an excellent job writing in the style of Jane Austen, and brings the same sort of twinkle-in-the-eye type of humor to the pages of her mysteries that Austen does in her novels.

I wouldn’t have thought that Elizabeth and her husband would make suitable solvers of mysteries before I read The Matters at Mansfield (the first novel in the series I have read), but the couple’s intellect and quick thinking make them quite suitable at solving mysterious affairs. If you’re a Jane Austen fan, or just love reading great mysteries, you’re sure to love reading The Matters at Mansfield.