Tag Archives: Jane Austen rewrite

Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid

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Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid is one of those rewrites done by contemporary authors to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice.

I enjoyed this one more than Alexander McCall Smith’s updated Emma. McDermid chose to change the setting to Edinburgh during the festival, giving herself plenty of scope to create an interesting and vibrant background for Cat (as the modern Catherine Morland styles herself) and her friends.

Cat is the daughter of a Church of England vicar and she lives with her family in Dorset. When a wealthy neighbour and his wife Susie offer to take Cat to Edinburgh for the festival she jumps at the chance. Cat has been home schooled and now that she is 17 she’s at a loose end, having no qualifications to get into college and having no idea what she wants to do with her life. She lives through novels.

Cat and Susie have a great time in Edinburgh, with Cat determined to see as much of the place as possible, taking Susie to places she had never been before, despite her being a festival regular.

They are invited to the Highland Ball, it’s the social event of the festival and Cat has to go to dancing lessons to learn Scottish country dancing. She’s paired up with Henry Tilney, he’s been to many a highland ball and he helps out at the dance school when they’re short of male partners.

Henry’s father is a retired general and has his three children in an iron grip of strict discipline. When Cat is invited to Northanger Abbey, the Tilney family home in the Scottish Borders, its Scottish baronial architecture coupled with Cat’s obsession with reading vampire/zombie fiction fuels Cat’s imagination. To make matters worse the abbey is a complete no signal zone for mobile phones and the general rarely allows the router to be switched on for the internet. Cat is completely out of her comfort zone. As you would expect, nothing goes smoothly for her.

Val McDermid name checks quite a few female writers in the book and annoyingly she starts it off in the Piddle Valley, Dorset and has a few daft/amusing village names along the same theme. Unfortunately I never did get around to writing a story featuring Piddle and surrounding daftly named villages as I said I would when we drove past a roadsign which pointed to Piddle when we were in England a while ago, I’m sure that Piddle wasn’t in Dorset though.

Anyway, this book is well worth reading, it’s a successful rewriting of Northanger Abbey and it’s the only book that I’ve read by Val McDermid. I somehow don’t think I’ll be reading any of her other books as I’m told they’re quite gruesome.

Emma by Alexander McCall Smith

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I’m really not all that keen on the idea of Jane Austen’s books being rewritten by famous contemporary authors, so I don’t really know why I decided to borrow this one Emma by Alexander McCall Smith which was published in 2014.

Actually I ended up quite enjoying it. It’s yonks since I read the original Emma, but I think that McCall Smith goes into more detail over some of the characters’ backgrounds, unnecessarily really, but otherwise it was fine.

Emma Woodhouse is of course being brought up by her father as her mother is dead. Mr Woodhouse was born during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a time when everyone was half expecting to be going up in a big nuclear bang. The stress of it all has affected his mother and she transferred her stress to her baby, which explains Mr Woodhouse’s extreme fear and stress over just about every aspect of life.

As Emma grows up he employs a Scottish governess for her. Miss Taylor comes from Edinburgh and is a typical Presbyterian, all conscience and hard work ethic. This gives the author a chance to delve into the philosophical, moral and ethical questions that he so much enjoys writing about, but those passages can sometimes fall with a clunk into the book.

I gave this one three stars on Goodreads. I see that there were six authors who were doing these rewrites, one of them was Val McDermid who rewrote Northanger Abbey and is one of the more successful ones. I think I’ll give that one a go sometimes. Have any of you read any of the others?