This is a post from Lynn Shepherd (taken from her blog) about how she went about ‘Ghosting Austen’
I was writing Murder at Mansfield Park when The Duchess came out on film, and I heard it being reviewed on BBC Radio 4. The critic said she loved the authentic settings and costumes, but felt it was let down by the script – especially the reference to Georgiana offering to ‘make a deal’ with her husband, when what she would actually have said was ‘make a bargain’.

It was a salutary reminder of what I already knew – even relatively small things like this will cumulatively detract from the authenticity of your prose. Right from the start, I’d always been determined to get this aspect of the book right – perhaps it’s the academic in me – but I knew my novel would never pass muster with the true Austen fan if it didn’t pass the accuracy test.

In practice this meant downloading all the novels, and checking pretty much every word as I went along. It sounds time-consuming – and it was – but imagine trying to do that before computers and wordsearch! The other key aspect of this process was to check not just if a word was used, but the context in which it appears. For example, my copy-editor came back to me after her first reading, and asked if we could change ‘the mood in the room’ to ‘the atmosphere in the room’ in one scene. I said I wished I could, but Austen never used the word ‘atmosphere’ except in the context of the weather. Again, it’s the little things. Continue reading →

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