Jane and the Ghosts of Netley

Editor’s Afterword

The present volume of Jane Austen’s detective memoirs is distinct from the six manuscripts I have previously edited in that it concludes abruptly — without the sort of coda she often wrote, to assure her readers of the pleasant future in store for those whose lives she had followed. We know from her novels that Austen enjoyed happy endings; but one clearly eluded her here, as it so often did in matters of the heart.

The story that unfolds in Jane and the Ghosts of Netley is one that I find particularly absorbing, because I have long been a student of the illegal marriage between Maria Fitzherbert, Catholic commoner, and George, Prince of Wales (later George IV of England). In editing the present manuscript, Saul David’s Prince of Pleasure: The Prince of Wales and the Making of the Regency (Great Britain: Little, Brown, 1998) was extremely helpful. David outlines the history of James Ord, Fitzherbert’s putative son, and his rearing among the Catholic gentry of Maryland. Ord did become a member of the Jesuit order, and later confronted his friends with questions regarding his parentage that were only partially answered. Mrs. Fitzherbert, though she never publicly admitted her parentage of Ord, declined categorically to sign a document testifying that her marriage to the Prince had been without issue. She is believed to have borne the Prince a daughter as well, one Maryanne Smythe, who was passed off as a niece and eventually reared in Mrs. Fitzherbert’s household.

For those interested in religious issues of the period, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829, by Michael A. Mullett (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), is instructive. For a history of the English and French in Portugal, I can recommend no finer work than Michael Glover’s The Peninsular War, 1807–1814 (London: David and Charles, 1974). Stephanie Barron

Golden, Colorado

March 2002