#Free amharic fiction books trial#
Hoping to obscure the true state of affairs, the four transported the dying Harriet to a boarding house in the London suburb of Penge, but soon found themselves on trial for murder.
Louis paid the two a small sum for Harriet’s care while enjoying a lovers’ idyll with Elizabeth’s teenage sister, Alice, in a nearby country house purchased with Harriet’s money. Not quite two years later, Harriet died of malnutrition after months of confinement in a small upstairs room in the house of Louis’s brother and sister-in-law, Patrick and Elizabeth (Harriet’s baby son had died a few weeks earlier). Her mother made a last ditch attempt to keep her safe by having Harriet declared mentally incompetent, but it was too little, too late. When well over thirty, she was courted and quickly won by an auctioneer’s clerk and small-time fortune hunter named Louis Staunton. The real-life Harriet Richardson was a Victorian heiress with the mental and social functioning of a child pampered and sheltered by her doting mother, she had acquired passable, if gauche, manners and a taste for fancy clothing. The figures in Jenkins’s book share their first names with their real-life counterparts, though Louis becomes Lewis, and the last names are changed. Jenkins may well have been alive when I read Harriet she died in 2010, at the age of 104. A bestseller in its day, it won the French Prix Femina Vie Heureuse Anglais it’s easy to imagine the countrywomen of Flaubert and Choderlos de Laclos responding to such a book (the Prix Femina is awarded by an all-female jury). When I learned that Persephone was republishing the book, I pulled it out again and found myself rereading the entire thing in a matter of hours. I first read Harriet a couple of years ago, after I came across a surprisingly sturdy Bantam paperback from 1946 in the bargain cart outside a used bookstore.
With pitiless clarity, Jenkins limns the process of self-deception by which four people, for the most ordinary of motives, bring themselves to commit murder by deliberate neglect. Her measured and elegant style does indeed evoke Austen, and the grace of the writing makes the book all the more chilling. What makes Harriet so haunting and memorable is the way in which Jenkins brings the gifts one would expect from a devotee of Austen, and the sensuous delicacy hinted at by Woolf and Mantel, to bear on such a cruel story. In Harriet, first published in 1934, Jenkins fictionalized the so-called Penge Murder of 1877, in which mentally disabled heiress Harriet Staunton was starved to death by her fortune-hunting husband and his family. Jenkins’s own first novel was described by Virginia Woolf as “a sweet white grape of a book,” and more recently Hilary Mantel called her writing “as smooth and seductive as a bowl of cream.” These epicurean metaphors take on a bitter irony in the present context. Not only was the writer Elizabeth Jenkins instrumental in saving Austen’s home at Chawton, she published a biography of the novelist in 1938. This April, Persephone Books republished Harriet, a disturbing tale of true crime written by one of the founders of the Jane Austen Society.
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