And Not A Moment Too Soon

I remember in school being assigned books to read. At some point I think we were assigned to read "Pride and Prejudice." I'm not saying I read it, but it was probably assigned. Now I'm a big reader, and I love the classics, especially anything concerning the sea, like "Moby Dick." Alright I just read the Cliff Notes, but the whole book must be fantastic. Melville himself would know how busy I've been and understand that I couldn't plow through 800 pages. Plus I know all that whaling shipboard crap and don't need to read it again. The fight with the whale is the whole thing anyway.

But I have to say there were times that we were assigned these "classics" to read and they were a stone cold bore.

As it stands, Jane Austen wrote quite a few books, and I can't remember anything about them so I think they were the kinds of books where people say "o that is a classic" but if you asked them they couldn't really tell you what was so great about it? You know the type. Thousands of these volumes floating around. Let me tell you, for every real old time classic like "Fanny Hill" there are a thousand snores out there. So maybe because of this arsenic accident Jane Austen got more attention for her brilliant short life, and since she didn't get to bury us in more boring books, by extension, things worked out for the rest of us as well. On the other hand, this sounds like a downer for Jane Austen and who knows, maybe she would have written something really good like "Batman" next and our whole culture suffered a tremendous loss. Potential double downer, or, as we say at the bar, the usual.

Few authors are as revered as Jane Austen. She wrote just a handful of novels, but all have gone on to be classics, read and re-read by generations. Now, though, a crime author has made a startling claim: Lindsay Ashford believes Austen may have been poisoned.

Indeed, the circumstances surrounding Austen's death have long been a bit mysterious. She died in 1817 at the age of 41. Experts haven't been able to come up with an exact cause of death, though most attribute her early demise to either cancer or Addison's disease. But Ashford now contends that the beloved author may have died of arsenic poisoning.

What's the reason behind the new theory? A buzzy article from the UK's Guardian explains: Three years ago, Ashford moved to Austen's village of Chawton to write a new crime novel. After she arrived, she started examining old letters of Austen and found a sentence that struck her as particularly suspicious.

Austen wrote: "I am considerably better now and am recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour."

Ashford had done plenty of crime research for her own novels, and says she recognized the symptoms as consistent with arsenic poisoning.

But that's not all. Ashford contacted the Jane Austen Society of North America with her newfound hunch--and the society's president told her that a lock of Austen's hair from a different museum was tested for arsenic and came up positive.

Still, arsenic poisoning per se doesn't necessarily mean murder. Back in Austen's time, arsenic was used as a kind of medicine (and you thought your HMO was the pits). As Ashford told the Guardian, "After all my research I think it's highly likely she was given a medicine containing arsenic. When you look at her list of symptoms and compare them to the list of arsenic symptoms, there is an amazing correlation."

[yahoo! news]