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Jane Austen had a taste for misdeeds that extended from her characters’ “blunders” to the moral dubiety of mercenary marriages, spousal murder, and other crimes. 1 As she wrote to her niece Anna, “[P] ictures of perfection . . . make me sick & wicked” (23–25 March 1817); she found the exemplary characters of didactic fiction dull and preferred to discuss the everyday flaws, sins, and crimes of her contemporaries and fictional characters. In her letters she is open about the social pleasures of crime as gossip—“The Wylmots being robbed must be an amusing thing to their acquaintance” (21–22 January 1801)—and claims superior powers of detection, boasting to Cassandra that “I have a very good eye at an Adultress” (12–13 May 1801). Deaths can be epistolary prizes: she notes casually, “I treat you with a dead Baronet in almost every Letter” (8–9 September 1816).
Her early open glee in crime as plot—when in her youthful writings her heroines stole, were violent, and confessed, “‘I murdered my father at a very early period of my Life, I have since murdered my Mother, and I am now going to murder my Sister’” ( Juvenilia 222)—was tamed in her more mature prose. As her heroine Catherine Morland learns, in polite England villainy does not often display itself in dramatic gothic form. Yet there are more connections between the early writings and the later than the general neglect of the former would suggest. The convenient death of Mrs. Churchill in Emma looks more sinister when viewed in the context of Lady Susan’s good wishes for the swift demise of her friend’s inconvenient husband ( Later Manuscripts 71–72), or Mary Stanhope’s mutterings about “‘the use of a great Jointure if Men live forever’” ( J 82). In this article I turn Austen upside down and back again to explore Austen’s lasting interest in deception and transgression. Drawing on Reginald Hill’s perceptive and affectionate conversation with Austen in A Cure for All Diseases—his 2008 novel, published in the U.S. and Canada as The Price of Butcher’s Meat—I look at the unpublished early writings alongside the unfinished Sanditon to argue that in Sanditon Austen develops her early interest in mysteries and violence to create a fictional world fit for...