Jane Austen

So I came across a really interesting article the other day on the Discovery News website; apparently, there's a group of people who believe that Jane Austen didn't die naturally but was POISONED.  DUN DUN DUUUNN.

According to the article, doctors and historians have speculated for years what the mysterious illness that killed the author at the age of 41 might be, but no one has ever been able to match up a symptom described in one of her letters to any suggested disease.  In her letter, she said, "I am considerably better now and recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour."

Mystery writer Lindsay Ashford suggests that this strange discoloration of her skin is a symptom of arsenic poisoning (although I'm not entirely sure I trust the credentials of a random mystery writer).  She wrote in a tidbit in the Daily Mail, a U.K. newspaper/news website, that arsenic "...causes skin spotting if taken in small doses over a long time... Known as the 'raindrop' effect, it causes some patches of skin to go dark brown or black; other areas lose all pigment to go white."

But speculation proves nothing; what's intriguing is that a friend of a couple who once owned a locke of Jane Austen's hair and later donated it to a museum told Ashford that the hair had been tested for arsenic, and it had tested positive.  Keep in mind that this is hearsay twice removed from the source, but still intriguing. 

While the chances are small that someone deliberately poisoned Austen, Ashford speculates that she may have been given medicine containing arsenic to treat a non-fatal illness, which may have ultimately hastened or caused her death.  Austen mentioned rheumatism in her letters, which is a disease for which medicine containing arsenic was prescribed.  "[Arsenic] was present in all manner of goods, from candles and wallpaper to dress fabric and sweets.  There was a jar in most households: used as rat poison, you could buy it loose at any grocer's shop with no questions asked.  A tasteless, odourless white powder, it was often mistaken for flour or baking powder with fatal results."

Ashford is taking the idea of Austen's deliberate poisoning with arsenic and running with it, writing a new novel called The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen.