About The Author
P D James - or to give her her full name Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park - is the doyenne of British crime writing, most famous for her series of crime novels featuring Adam Dalgliesh of the Metropolitan Police Service.
James was educated at Cambridge High School for Girls, upon which Ronald Searle once told her the infamous St Trinians' was based. James was awarded an OBE in 1983 and made a Conservative life peer in 1991. In 2008, she was inducted into the International Crime Writing Hall of Fame and, in 2009, she was a guest editor on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, during which she conducted a combative interview with Mark Thompson, Director-general of the BBC.
Adam Dalgliesh is also a published poet and is modelled on Mr Darcy from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. His surname came form a favourite English teacher and his forename is that of her father. He first appears as a Detective Chief Inspector in Cover Her Face, published in 1960. He has appeared in a further thirteen novels since, rising to the position of Commander. His most recent outing was in 2008's The Private Patient. Ten of her Adam Dalgliesh novels have been adapted for television, starring Roy Marsden or, latterly, Martin Shaw.
James has also written two novels featuring private detective Cordelia Gray, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) and The Skull beneath the Skin (1982); the former was made into a series of television adaptations between 1997 and 2001, starring Helen Baxendale.
She has written two earlier standalone novels: Innocent Blood was published in 1980 and The Children of Men in 1992; the latter was adapted into a film in 2006 starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine.
She has also written three books of non-fiction. The Maul and the Pear Tree, co-written with T A Critchley covered the Ratcliff Highway murders of 1811; Time to be in Earnest (1999) is autobiographical, covering her 78th year; and in Talking about Detective Fiction (2009), she applies her five decades of expertise to analysing mystery fiction from throughout history, from Wilkie Collins to Henning Mankell.
Her new novel, Death Comes to Pemberley, is inspired by her lifelong passion for the novels of Jane Austen. Set in 1803, it introduces the affluent Darcy and Elizabeth, head of a family who are at the heart of Pemberley society. This gentility is destroyed on the eve of the autumn ball, when Elizabeth's unreliable younger sister arrives, screaming that her husband has been murdered.
You can read the Prologue to this gripping new departure for P D James below.
Click here to see a short interview with P D James about her new book and her love for Jane Austen.
Below the extract is a list of titles by P D James currently in print in the UK. You may find other editions in our 'New and Used' section by typing the author's name into the Search field at the top of this page and selecting the 'Author Exact' filter to the far right of the Search field.
Extracts
Prologue
The Bennets of Longbourn
It was generally agreed by the female residents of Meryton that Mr and Mrs Bennet of Longbourn had been fortunate in the disposal in marriage of four of their five daughters. Meryton, a small market town in Hertfordshire, is not on the route of any tours of pleasure, having neither beauty of setting nor a distinguished history, while its only great house, Netherfield Park, although impressive, is not mentioned in books about the county's notable architecture. The town has an assembly room where dances are regularly held but no theatre, and the chief entertainment takes place in private houses where the boredom of dinner parties and whist tables, always with the same company, is relieved by gossip.
A family of five unmarried daughters is sure of attracting the sympathetic concern of all their neighbours, particularly where other diversions are few, and the situation of the Bennets was especially unfortunate. In the absence of a male heir, Mr Bennet's estate was entailed on his nephew, the Reverend William Collins, who, as Mrs Bennet was fond of loudly lamenting, could turn her and her daughters out of the house before her husband was cold in his grave. Admittedly, Mr Collins had attempted to make such redress as lay in his power. At some inconvenience to himself, but with the approval of his formidable patroness Lady Catherine de Bourgh, he had left his parish at Hunsford in Kent to visit the Bennets with the charitable intention of selecting a bride from the five daughters. This intention was received by Mrs Bennet with enthusiastic approval but she warned him that Miss Bennet, the eldest, was likely to be shortly engaged. His choice of Elizabeth, the second in seniority and beauty, had met with a resolute rejection and he had been obliged to seek a more sympathetic response to his pleading from Elizabeth's friend Miss Charlotte Lucas. Miss Lucas had accepted his proposal with gratifying alacrity and the future which Mrs Bennet and her daughters could expect was settled, not altogether to the general regret of their neighbours. On Mr Bennet's death, Mr Collins would install them in one of the larger cottages on the estate where they would receive spiritual comfort from his administrations and bodily sustenance from the leftovers from Mrs Collins's kitchen augmented by the occasional gift of game or a side of bacon.
But from these benefits the Bennet family had a fortunate escape. By the end of 1799 Mrs Bennet could congratulate herself on being the mother of four married daughters. Admittedly the marriage of Lydia, the youngest, aged only sixteen, was not propitious. She had eloped with Lieutenant George Wickham, an officer in the militia which had been stationed at Meryton, an escapade which was confidently expected to end, as all such adventures deserve, in her desertion by Wickham, banishment from her home, rejection from society and the final degradation which decency forbade the ladies to mention. The marriage had, however, taken place, the first news being brought by a neighbour, William Goulding, when he rode past the Longbourn coach and the newly married Mrs Wickham placed her hand on the open window so that he could see the ring. Mrs Bennet's sister, Mrs Philips, was assiduous in circulating her version of the elopement, that the couple had been on their way to Gretna Green but had made a short stop in London to enable Wickham to inform a godmother of his forthcoming nuptials, and, on the arrival of Mr Bennet in search of his daughter, the couple had accepted the family's suggestion that the intended marriage could more conveniently take place in London. No one believed this fabrication, but it was acknowledged that Mrs Philips's ingenuity in devising it deserved at least a show of credulity. George Wickham, of course, could never be accepted in Meryton again to rob the female servants of their virtue and the shopkeepers of their profit, but it was agreed that, should his wife come among them, Mrs Wickham should be afforded the tolerant forbearance previously accorded to Miss Lydia Bennet.
Click here to read the rest of the Prologue