Let Your Eye Wander Over This Austen Mystery

Jane and the Wandering Eye by Stephanie Barron

In Jane and the Wandering Eye, Stephanie Barron finally shows us the wry wit and intelligence Jane Austen possesses. For two books, all of Jane's acquaintances praise her perspicacity, but rarely do we see it. Certainly, we never see it displayed the way we do in this novel. It is a delightful display.

The book contains the shortest editor's forward of the three novels, evidence that Barron is growing in confidence in her characters and feeling less of a need to excuse her borrowing from history. She includes historical figures and actual events from Austen's life, but the story and plot are entirely of Barron's creation.

Jane and the Wandering Eye is the third book in Stephanie Barron's Jane Austen series. In it, she features the "newly discovered" journals of Jane Austen. The Austen we meet is a shrewd detective whose eye for detail and clarity of thinking make her a formidable opponent to those engaging in murder and intrigue. As the novels are told from the perspective of Jane's journal (and the occasional letter), Barron must closely imitate Austen's actual style, which she does extremely faithfully.

The book opens with Jane attending a rout-party on Dec. 12, 1804 (less than three months after the close of Jane and the Man of the Cloth.) It is a post-theatrical masquerade and she is attending with her brother Henry and his wife Eliza. Her attendance is actually a cover for her true purpose. She's been commission to shadow the Lady Desdemona and advise her "gentleman rogue" of where the lady's attentions lie. Her charge becomes more serious when one of the party-goers is found stabbed to death and the man arrested for the deed is Lady Desdemona's brother.

The search for the murderer takes Jane and her "gentleman rogue" through the Bath theater community and the upper-crust society in which she is a familiar, but temporary, guest. In this novel, Jane beings to experience the disapproval of her relatives for what they view as the sullying of her reputation. We see Jane begin to fall in love with a person to whom her society will never allow her to be matched. Poor Jane exists in a society where she is already an old maid at 29 and she has neither fortune nor good looks to recommend her (much like the heroines in her novels). She does, however, possess a splendid wit and we are treated with her cleverness and ingenuity throughout the course of this novel.

The cover of this book deserves special mention. While I do not intend to fault Barron's vivid descriptions, there is one object that definitely needed an illustration-the pendant with a portrait of an eye. Barron fully describes the artistic fan and the ways in which they were bestowed and worn. But it is the picture on the cover which is most captivating. The cover artist, Carol Inouye, has created an outstanding cover whose painting accurately captures the timbre of the book's words. She repeats her thematic image in subtle ways that support and expand the novel perfectly. Inouye herself is the author of several out-of-print garden and sewing books and has illustrated fairy tales, cook books, and children's books.

If this book has a fault, it is that there is something of the transitive feel about it. Barron is establishing a pattern that we can expect to be repeated. Yet, so skillful is Barron's handling of her subject that it's a pattern worth repeating.

Jane and the Wandering Eye takes the reader on a lively romp complete with riddles and a parlor-room denouement. Barron excels at suspense and surprise endings and there is nothing in this book to disappoint or betray.