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Amelia Blackwell is the author of A Crime Through Time: Miss Darcy Investigates, out now from Pan Macmillan. Below, she considers what Jane Austen would think of Georgiana Darcy as an amateur detective in a cozy mystery novel.

Like most writers, Jane Austen was keen to make money from her work. If she were alive in 2026, I like to imagine her publishing a slew of cosy crime novels and earning a fortune from her books, certainly more than the £668 that historian Lucy Worsley reports Austen to have made from publication of the four novels that were released during her lifetime, in a period when the average solicitor could expect to earn an annual income of £1500, overtaking Austen’s total lifetime earnings in just six months. 

Austen’s mix of gentle humour, razor-sharp characterisation, and clever plotting conjures worlds that perfectly lend themselves to cosy mysteries—passions swirl beneath a tranquil surface, little is said but much is felt, and all that unspoken tension, lust, and ambition is the perfect stage for a crime.

Sadly for us, Jane Austen is not here to swerve into the cosy mystery lane, but I hope she would be amused rather than offended by the thought of Mr Darcy’s younger sister, Georgiana, as an amateur detective and heroine of her own story.

It’s hard to know what kind of voice Jane Austen envisaged for Georgiana Darcy, as she doesn’t give her a single line of dialogue in Pride and Prejudice; Austen already had her hands full with her magnificent cast of principal characters, but Georgiana is a silent and intriguing figure in the story, nonetheless. 

In A Crime Through Time, Georgiana Darcy finds a new vocation as a time-travelling detective and, with her Motorola pager stowed safely in her reticule and her fierce intellect at the ready, she also finds a voice—whether it’s one that would meet the approval or censure of the author of Pride and Prejudice is up for debate, but it is my cherished hope (and secret belief) that A Crime Through Time would, at the very least, have given Jane Austen a good laugh.