Was Jane Austen Murdered?

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”

This line is popularly taken from “Pride and Prejudice,” one of the novels written by Jane Austen, an English novelist and realist whose works are mostly of romantic fiction, made her as one of the most widely read writers in English literature and was adapted to a movie in the caption itself.

Austen’s works also includes Sense and Sensibility, Mansfileld Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion and the incomplete Sanditon.

According to one biographer, Jane Austen’s biographical information is “famously scarce” knowing that scholars could not have the precise and complete information about the novelist’s life because most of the biographical material produced for fifty years after Austen’s death was written by her relatives, and some letters were destroyed and burned by her sister C(–foul word(s) removed–)andra and the heirs of his brother Francis Austen.

Austen’s death at the age of 41 on July 18 1817 was deeply controversial because of ‘medical reasons.’ Her cause of death as according to Dr. Vincent Cope’s tentative retrospective diagnosis was Addison’s disease, and later described as Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Moreover, recent work by Katherine White of Britain’s Addison’s Disease Self Help Group suggests that Austen likely died of bovine tuberculosis while Linda Robinson Walker said that it might be Brill-Zinsser disease.

But what really cause Austen’s death?

A new explaination from crime novelist Lindsay Ashford says that Jane Austen death is caused by arsenic poisoning. Three years ago, Ashford moved to Austen’s village of Chawton started writing her new crime novel in the former home of Austen’s brother, stumbled across another possibility — that Austen died of arsenic poisoning.

While reading Austen’s correspondence, Ashford came across a line the novelist wrote just a few months before she died: “I am considerably better now and am recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour.”

From her familiarity with poisons from researching her crime novels, Ashford recognized that Austen having the patches of skin brown or black while other areas go white are merely symptoms of arsenic poisoning.

Also, the lock of Austen’s hair bought at auction in 1948 had tested positive for arsenic as what former president of the Jane Austen Society of North America testified.

“As a crime writer I’ve done a lot of research into arsenic, and I think it was just a bit of serendipity, that someone like me came to look at her letters with a very different eye to the eye most people cast on Jane Austen. It’s just luck I have this knowledge, which most Austen academics wouldn’t,” Ashford said.

“I don’t think murder is out of the question,” she said. “Having delved into her family background, there was a lot going on that has never been revealed and there could have been a motive for murder.”

“In the early 19th century a lot of people were getting away with murder with arsenic as a weapon, because it wasn’t until the Marsh test was developed in 1836 that human remains could be analysed for the presence of arsenic,” Ashford added.

She believes that Austen was given medicines containing arsenic, and it’s quite possible that Austen was murdered, not just medicated as what she wrote in her new novel, “The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen.”