Retrospective and Prospective

This month, we look back on our recent work, especially at books published during 2020. I fell a little short of that date, as my last published book came out in October 2019. The Bride of Northanger is a sequel to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and it follows her heroine Catherine Moreland into her marriage with the delightful Henry Tilney. It features romance, mystery, Gothic chills, suspense, murder, laughs, and love…all in one Regency stew. An excerpt from Chapter Two, Catherine and Henry’s wedding night, follows.

I haven’t exactly been inactive during the last year – there was the little matter of living in the pandemic, as we all have been doing, and a good deal of nursing an ill husband (who has since thankfully recovered). And if I didn’t write another book, I did write plays, and performed skits and sketches in several Zoom events, including a reprise of my Austen Assizes play with Syrie James on Austen Variations’ Jane in June event, and a playful visit to several minor characters, with my son Paul the librarian and his puppets, for the Jane in January event.

Doing a Zoom play at home!

For the Prospective part, I’m looking forward to doing more plays – I love writing dialogue and putting Austen’s characters in new situations, which is perfect for Austenesque comedy. I hope my output for 2021 will include a play collection!

So onward into what we all hope will be a healthy and peaceful future, with as much reading and writing and thinking about Jane Austen as we can possibly do!

Happy New Year to all.

Diana Birchall

The Bride of Northanger – Chapter Two

The wedding was not one that would have made a show according to the General’s ideas; but his approval of the quiet ceremony and homely refreshment afterwards, was not required, for he was happily not among those present. The bride’s father read the service with proper emotion in his voice, and after a light collation, and the considerable business of being kissed by all her numerous brothers and sisters, the bride and groom were duly seated in his carriage, she in her new bridal finery and he in the very same handsomely caped greatcoat that she had first admired. And so they drove away, among many good natured cries wishing them good health and good luck.

Once before, Catherine had journeyed on this road, alone and miserable, exiled from Northanger Abbey by her present father-in-law; but on this occasion, with what entirely different feelings did she seat herself in Henry’s curricle, and rejoice in the smart equipage, as the pretty, fast-stepping horses made good speed on the road toward what she already gladly thought of as home. Even the fleeting thought of the family curse, that would intrude, gave only an exciting fillip to her happy spirits.

It was a journey of fifty miles, for Woodston was twenty miles closer to Fullerton than Northanger; but with only a rest at Salisbury, and stopping for some cold victuals at Marlborough, the young couple crossed into Gloucestershire and reached Woodston village after a journey of not more than seven hours, long before they could tire of being on the road, or of being in each other’s company.

All good things, as her mother was fond of saying, come to an end, however, and so Catherine alighted from the carriage with a spring, as fresh and as gay as she had started out in the morning, and after turning the horses over to his groom, Henry, with feelings of the greatest gladness, invited his bride into her new home.

Catherine had seen Woodston before, but now there was all the fresh delight of discovering every thing Henry had done to the place, to prepare it for her reception. Her conviction, from her only previous visit, that it was the most delightful of all houses in the world, was swiftly confirmed.

The servants welcomed her warmly, and she was shown to her freshly decorated, pretty chamber, where her new maid, Annette, the young niece of the housekeeper, and very happy and important in her new position, helped her to change her dress. Still not at all fatigued, Catherine stepped outside into the grounds, where Henry was waiting for her, accompanied by his dogs.

“Oh! How the little terrier puppies are grown,” she cried.

“That is in the natural course of things, as you last saw them a year ago,” Henry told her with a smile.

“How I do love them,” she exulted, kneeling down. “I might say I married you for their sake, only I don’t want to make you jealous.”

“Jealous of Archimedes and Artemis?” Henry pretended outrage.

“Not of their names, at any rate,” Catherine amended.

After fifteen minutes’ romp on the grass, Henry looked at the sky, as if pleased with every thing that was under it. “My housekeeper, Mrs. Billings – our housekeeper, I mean – hinted at some fine preparations going on for our supper. Perhaps we had better go in and pretend surprise.”

As they passed into the house, Catherine paused for another rapturous look at the drawing-room, that she had thought perfection, even before there was a stick of furniture in it. Last year there had been nothing to be seen but polished floors and long windows looking out onto the green meadows; but Henry, with some advice and assistance from his sister, had fitted it up charmingly. Two low seats by the fire looked particularly inviting, and Henry pointed out the well-filled book case nearby.

“Here are Cowper, and Crabbe, and Scott,” he said enthusiastically, “and we will read poetry together, and some science, this winter – I have some mind to build an orrery.”

“Will we? How delightful! Is it a bird-cage?”

“No, my love, a thing to trace the stars.”

His cheek was close to hers, but after a few moments Catherine’s attention was distracted by the entrancing wall-paper, in a pretty pattern with Chinese birds and flowers.

“Why! Those are hyacinths!”

“Eleanor sent for the paper from Paris,” Henry explained, “to commemorate how first you learned to love a hyacinth, and then, myself – or at least, my dogs.”

“Our dogs,” Catherine reminded him, “though I hope to claim the privilege of my new married state, and have the naming of the next litter myself.”

“You shall do all the naming in this family,” promised Henry, raising a faint blush in Catherine.

Henry next took his lady in to the dining-room, where roasted spring lamb and green peas were brought in, followed by strawberries and a large white cake that the cook had prepared in their honour. Glasses of wine were poured out as they sat by the fire, and read their first poem together. It was not a long one, only an extract from the Lyrical Ballads.

“The eye it cannot chuse but see,
“We cannot bid the ear be still;
“Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
“Against, or with our will.

After reading it, Henry, his eyes demurely lowered, proposed an early retiring.

He took up his candle, and showed Catherine to her room, where the maid waited to comb out her hair. At just the proper moment he returned, to make what he must have felt a daring proposal: that instead of setting up rooms of their own, they

should sleep altogether in hers, and his be used only as a dressing-room and to keep some of his papers and books.

This seemed to Catherine only a very sensible and natural proposal, for it was no more than what her parents had always done, though she could not look at him as she agreed to it; and so they retired to bed, and together blew out the candles.