New Call For Jane Austen’s Cause Of Death – Arsenic Poisoning

After 200 years after her early death at 41, Jane Austen has been attributed to many things, even to cancer from Addison’s disease. Now a crime novelist has uncovered a new possibility – arsenic poisoning.

British crime novelist and journalist Lindsay Ashford, moved to Chawton three years ago, the village where Austen lived, and started writing her new crime novel in the library of Jane’s brother’s former home. From her research, she soon occupied in volumes of aged of Austen’s letters, and one morning she stumbled a sentence Austen few months before her untimely death, the sentence says: “I am considerably better now and am recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong color.”

Equipped with modern forensic techniques and vast knowledge in poisons for her crime novels, Ashford then instantly realized that that sentence describes symptoms for arsenic poisoning, which causes “raindrop” pigmentation and patches of skin go black or brown, while other areas turn to white.

With that theory in mind, she then arranged a meeting with the former president of Jane Austen society of North America, who then backed up her theory with the information of Austen’s hair displayed in a nearby museum was once tested for arsenic and comic up positive by now deceased American couple who bought their hair from an auction in 1948.

With her theory been backed-up with facts, Ashford claimed the chronic symptoms Austen wrote about in
her letters were in fact, signs of arsenic poisoning. Arsenic and other similar poisonous element was widely available at that time, as it was used in the form of Fowler’s solution to treat rheumatism – something Austen described in one of her letters to syphilis.

In her interview with the Guardian, Ashton said - “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.”

Ashton added that it is highly likely that Jane Austen suffered from arsenic poisoning after getting a prescription from her doctor for other disease. Also, she looked at the possibility that Austen was killed with arsenic in her new novel, The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen.

Janet Todd, professor and editor for the Cambridge edition of Jane Austen states that the murder was highly implausible, “I doubt very much she would have been poisoned intentionally. I think it’s very unlikely. But the possibility she had arsenic for rheumatism, say, is quite likely,” I added. “It’s certainly odd that she died quite so young. [But] in the absence of digging her up and finding out, which would not be appreciated, nobody knows what she died of.”

Though Lindsay Ashford would love to see Austen’s bones reveal more clues through modern forensics analysis, she knows that this is unlikely to happen, and understands the strong possibility of people getting outraged by the idea.

By: Caz

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