The Death of Jane Lawrence is one of those books that sounds like it should be good, but then it turns out not to be. Very disappointing, as I love me a gothic novel. The Death of Jane Lawrence definitely is gothic, and there were definitely creepy moments that I read through very quickly because I did not want to scare myself before going to be bed, but in the end, The Death of Jane Lawrence gets bogged down in the science of magic, and I am not entirely sure what I was that I just read.

The Death of Jane Lawrence is about a young woman, Jane Shoringfield, who decides she is in need of a husband. Jane is intelligent and practical, a self-taught accountant, but she keeps herself from getting too close to people after losing both of her parents when she was a child. Janes proposes a marriage of convenience to her first choice of potential husbands, Dr. Augustine Lawrence, the only doctor in her small town. She offers to do his bookkeeping and help run his practice in exchange for the protection that a husband can offer a single woman at that time (I will get to the setting in a moment) and they do not even have to consummate the marriage. Dr. Lawrence is reluctant to agree to the marriage, but there is, inevitably, an attraction between them and the exchange of longing looks. Dr. Lawrence eventually agrees to marry Jane on one condition: that she never sets foot in his familial home, Lindridge Hall, which is outside of town. He will spend every night there, but she must stay behind and live at his office. Jane is initially disappointed by this condition, but figures she can work around it, so she acquiesces.

Of course, as soon as they are married, the first thing that happens is Jane ends up at Lindridge Hall, which is shocking in its decrepit state. Dr. Lawrence is cagey about why he does not want Jane staying there, but initially everything appears to be fine, until it isn’t, and Jane starts to distrust her husband. The Death of Jane Lawrence gives off vibes of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Lindridge Hall is deliciously creepy. So where does the novel go wrong? Well first, the setting. Starling set her novel in an alternate version of 19th century England called “Great Breltain”. I think the novel would have been more disconcerting if it had been grounded in our world instead, as I could not take this novel as seriously as I should have with it being set in an alternate world. Second, magic plays an important role in the story, but not a fantastical kind of magic. Instead, it is a kind of magic that Jane spends a lot of time comparing to mathematics, and I hate math, so I had a hard time of following it. I think this novel would have been better if it had been stripped back to a simple ghost story and focused on how a haunting, rather than magic, can have a psychological effect on a person.