When Cat finally escapes Edinburgh for the Tilney family pile of the title, she stumbles upon what initially promises to be a gruesome mystery. Henry and Cat’s conversations about literature feel forced, and incessant references to social media are as glib as the girls’ OMGs and WTFs.

Though brisk, her prose lacks Austen’s zingy insights and tart dialogue. As romantic intrigue thickens, the novel’s plot sticks doggedly to the original. Cat moons after Henry, Johnny pursues Cat, and Bella has a thing for Cat’s older brother, James, who unexpectedly visits. There she meets brash Bella Thorpe her boorish brother, Johnny and the refined Tilney siblings, Henry and Ellie. Cat’s big shot at longed-for adventure comes when some neighbors invite her to accompany them to the Edinburgh Festival for the summer. Nevertheless, home schooling and a rural upbringing have kept her almost as naïve as Austen’s 17-year-old heroine. She posts selfies to Facebook and fuels an overactive imagination reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies rather than The Mysteries of Udolpho. The penultimate edition in Folio’s Jane Austen series, this volume is bound in gold cloth, and the slipcase reproduces the work’s spirited first line.In the second installment of the Austen Project, which has contemporary writers updating the classic novels, McDermid ( Cross and Burn, 2013, etc.) strives to reinvigorate an overlooked Gothic parody with a 21st-century makeover.Ĭlergyman’s daughter Catherine Morland is known as Cat in her latter-day incarnation. Witty, fresh and perceptive, the images perfectly reflect Austen’s wonderfully sardonic novel. Jonathan Burton has contributed six colour illustrations, depicting both the ballrooms of Bath and the imposing Abbey. As Val McDermid writes in her introduction – a heartfelt account of how Northanger Abbey has reinvented itself for her with each rereading – ‘Austen unfailingly provides us with the opportunity to investigate our own lives and find surprising truths there.’

Just as Austen’s talent for satire exposes the failings of the overwrought gothic novels of the age, her subtle, beautifully observed portrait of Bath society reveals the real value of fiction: its power to convey ‘the most thorough knowledge of human nature’. But the tongue-in-cheek tone that characterises the story belies the skill of a truly great writer flexing her creative muscles. Simply told in lively and elegant prose, this is Austen’s most playful work. The last of Austen’s novels to be published, appearing posthumously in 1818, Northanger Abbey was the first to be completed, written when Austen was in her early twenties. ‘Somehow, Austen had the insight and skill to delineate life beyond her years and her experience.’

Northanger abbey by val mcdermid