The blog tour for Diana Birchall's Northanger Abbey sequel, The Bride of Northanger, stops here today for my review of the book. I read Northanger Abbey a few years ago and would heartily recommend it. I was very interested to read this sequel, because so much Austenesque that I read is based on Pride & Prejudice and it's good to have a change. I have also read very few sequels of the stories, so I was intrigued to where Diana Birchall would take these characters. Let's look at the blurb, and then we will move on to what I thought of The Bride of Northanger.
A happier heroine than Catherine Morland does not exist in England, for she is about to marry her beloved, the handsome, witty Henry Tilney. The night before the wedding, Henry reluctantly tells Catherine and her horrified parents a secret he has dreaded to share - that there is a terrible curse on his family and their home, Northanger Abbey. Henry is a clergyman, educated and rational, and after her year’s engagement Catherine is no longer the silly young girl who delighted in reading “horrid novels”; she has improved in both reading and rationality. This sensible young couple cannot believe curses are real...until a murder at the Abbey triggers events as horrid and Gothic as Jane Austen ever parodied - events that shake the young Tilneys’ certainties, but never their love for each other ...
