So19 Reviews: NANCY BILYEAU'S The Heiress of Northanger Abbey

Old threats, like vampires, never die in Bilyeau's excellent extension of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. The Catherine Morland of that novel, now 39, lives happily with her husband, Henry Tilney, and children at Woodston Rectory, some twenty miles distant from the Tilney family seat at Northanger Abbey. The years have led to some softening of her frame—"My looking glass showed a face rounder than when I first saw Northanger. If I tilted my chin down, a bit of flesh wiggled below"—but given her considerably more confidence. She still remembers the wild fantasies her youthful immersion in Gothic novels inspired. “I admit my imagination ran to more extremes than painted glass," she tells the children of her friend and sister-in-law, now Viscountess Granville. "I was certain that any place called an ‘abbey’ must be full of thick cobwebs, crumbling furniture, and dark and dirty secret passageways.” But she's also able to laugh at herself, commenting that the Granville daughters reacted to those visions "with as much astonishment as if I’d said I expected a herd of crazed beasts to rampage through the garden roses."

The novel opens with a letter from Catherine's 17-year-old daughter Phoebe, who is staying in Bath with her childless uncle Frederick Tilney and his wife. (Appropriately, the missive arrives amid a storm, which delivers a flash of lightning that "illuminated General Tilney’s portrait. In that second, his cold, calculating eyes turned fiery, as if he were angry with me. I could feel the rage pouring off the portrait as it did twenty‑two years ago from the man himself.") Phoebe mentions meeting Isabella and John Thorpe, whose greed endangered her decades before and who now hope to interest the 17 year old, who they believe to be Frederick Tilney's heir, in John's son Jack. Catherine's maternal instinct, and perhaps some of what we might call PTSD from her own encounter with the Thorpes, sound an ear-splitting alarm. She persuades Henry that she must visit Bath to warn and protect Phoebe, and the plot is off and running.

Crafting a satisfying sequel to a classic novel is a tough job, and many such books feel like faint, faded echoes of their originals. Bilyeau's homage, in contrast, meets the challenge admirably. Catherine is recognizably the girl from Austen's novel but also a convincing middle-aged mother; the settings, from a recently redecorated Abbey to the watering-place of Bath, are vividly rendered; the outsize power of inheritance to shape Regency lives remains a central theme; as importantly as any of those, the novel's voice is suitably wry and lively. Bilyeau succeeds, too, in playing Gothic tropes and tales against the novel's earthly (one might say grubby) dangers. John Polidori's The Vampyre, publishing the year before this novel opens, is used to excellent effect, as are the briefer references to sensation fiction sprinkled throughout the text. Like Austen's, Bilyeau's novel is a love letter to literature and the imagination, as well as a meditation on the importance of reading—and trusting—real-world clues.