Review: The Heiress of Northanger Abbey

 

I’m a sucker for meta-fiction. So when someone comes along with a sequel to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey which, rather than satirizing the gothic novel, embraces it, validating all Catherine Morland’s forbidding fantasies—I’m all in.

(If you haven’t read the original, Wikipedia sums it up as a coming-of-age story and a satire of the Gothic novel, and that’s all you need to know going forward, except that it’s my second favorite Austen novel, with Emma leading by a nose.)

So: it takes an enormous amount of chutzpah to attempt a sequel to a Jane Austen novel. It takes skill to capture an echo of Austen’s strait-laced prose style while retaining one’s own authorial voice. And it takes an enormous amount of sensitivity, research, and sheer talent to pull it off convincingly.

Nancy Bilyeau is more than up to the task. 

The main cast is the same, heroes and villains both—with one important addition: the heiress of the title, Phoebe, Catherine and Henry’s eldest daughter. While Catherine is still the protagonist, it’s Phoebe’s fate she--and we--are consumed by.

Oh, and there’s also a shadowy figure who may or may not be a vampire, but is definitely a bloodsucker. Don’t turn your back on him.

As the story opens, Phoebe is at Bath, “taking the waters” (read: mingling with society) as Catherine did all those years ago when she was a slip of a girl, and just as Catherine did, she has met Isabella Thorpe, the false friend and author of all her mother’s woes. Hearing of this, nothing will do but for Catherine to fly to Bath to protect her daughter from Isabella’s wiles.

But times change. Isabella seems no threat at all. She’s reformed, wants to bury the past, and Phoebe has become fast friends with Isabella’s daughter. All Catherine’s worries were unfounded, just as her down-to-earth husband Henry has predicted.

There’s even talk of Phoebe making a visit to the Thorpe home on the wild moors of Devonshire. Catherine has not has all her fears allayed, but Phoebe has a stubborn streak, and at last, despite her misgivings, Catherine gives in—as long as she can accompany her daughter on the trip.

And that, as they might have said in Regency days, is when the fewmets hit the windmill. Is Phoebe in danger from the Thorpes, or is it all Catherine’s fantasy? This is the hinge the story swings on.

A fixer-upper in Devonshire

A constant theme in Austen is the flowering of self-knowledge in her naïve young heroines. So how to deal with the over-imaginative tendencies of Catherine Tilney nee Morland as a forty-year-old wife and mother? Twenty-two years of marriage, two daughters, and the cares of a clergyman’s wife, the absolutely corseted requirements of society and especially great houses such as the Abbey, have sobered her, but she still wears her heart on her sleeve, and still has a galloping imagination that she has learned to keep a tight rein on. The child is mother to the woman.

Where the original Northanger Abbey plays on the edge of the Gothic, The Heiress of Northanger Abbey dives right in the deep end, replete with a crumbling estate vastly more haunted than the Abbey, and it even features a putative vampire. If you’ve often wished, as I have, that Catherine’s dark forebodings in Austen’s novel might prove out, Bilyeau’s novel will be catnip for you. Call it Gothic wish fulfillment. Yet it’s firmly grounded in the realities of 18th century English society. 

There’s a thin line between life and literature in Northanger Abbey, walking side by side, sometimes dissolving into one another, always subtly reminding the reader of its own artifice. The Heiress assays that same tightrope with daring and grace. “For an instant it felt like a cruel twist on a Gothic novel,” our heroine says at one point. Just so.

Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland

What some will be asking is this: can the book stand on its own, without ever having read a word of Jane Austen? Yes, as a modern romp through the gothic novel, full of finely chiseled characters and a plot threatening to burst its stays, I’d recommend it to any fan of the historical novel. The prose is as strait-laced as Austen’s own; the matter more daring. 

If it tempts you to dig into the original Northanger Abbey (it will), all the better.

The Heiress of Northanger Abbey is available for pre-order now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org.