Revisiting Pride and Prejudice: P. D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley

In Death Comes to Pemberley, P. D. James re-creates Jane Austen’s world in a new context, involving the characters in a murder mystery. She analyses the whole situation through the privileged lens of a woman who looks at Austen’s society and its change, giving emphasis to the distortion of her characters’ perspective, which, consequently, becomes a distortion of the truth. The aim of this paper is to analyse the evolution of James’s characters from the starting point of the murder, to show how social and psychological conflicts have been re-written representing a hallmark of Austen and James’s realism.