Below is the complete list of Val McDermid’s Austen Project books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Austen Project Books
About Austen Project
The Austen Project is a multi-author publishing venture that invited contemporary novelists to reimagine Jane Austen’s major novels in modern settings. Val McDermid contributed Northanger Abbey, the second published installment, bringing Austen’s youthful satire of Gothic fiction into twenty-first-century Scotland. The broader project was conceived as a series of contemporary reinterpretations rather than a connected fictional universe, so each volume has its own author, characters, setting, and style while retaining the central relationships and narrative architecture of an Austen original.
Joanna Trollope opened the project in 2013 with Sense & Sensibility, relocating the Dashwood family’s financial and romantic difficulties to contemporary Britain. McDermid followed in 2014 with Northanger Abbey. Alexander McCall Smith subsequently reworked Emma, while Curtis Sittenfeld transformed Pride and Prejudice into Eligible. Although the original ambition was to produce new versions of all six completed Austen novels, only these four reinterpretations were ultimately published; modern Austen Project versions of Mansfield Park and Persuasion did not follow.
McDermid was an especially intriguing choice for Northanger Abbey. Best known for psychologically dark crime fiction, serial-killer investigations, and detectives including Tony Hill, Carol Jordan, Karen Pirie, and Lindsay Gordon, she approached the Austen novel most overtly fascinated by mystery and Gothic storytelling. The original Catherine Morland is a young woman whose enthusiasm for sensational Gothic novels encourages her to imagine sinister secrets where more ordinary human failings provide the real explanation. McDermid preserves that tension while replacing Catherine with Cat Morland, a sheltered teenager growing up in Dorset.
Cat’s introduction to a wider world comes when family friends take her to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Edinburgh gives McDermid a convincing modern equivalent to Austen’s Bath: crowded, fashionable, theatrical, socially fluid, and full of unfamiliar people capable of feeding Cat’s imagination. There she becomes involved with Bella Thorpe and encounters Henry Tilney and his sister Ellie, relationships that reproduce the attractions, misunderstandings, and manipulations underlying Austen’s story without attempting to imitate Regency social customs literally.
The contemporary version of Northanger Abbey becomes an imposing Scottish estate. Cat’s fascination with supernatural fiction, particularly modern vampire culture version of Northanger Abbey becomes an imposing Scottish estate. Cat’s fascination with supernatural fiction, particularly, makes the house fertile territory for increasingly elaborate suspicions. Smartphones, Facebook, texting, popular fiction, and twenty-first-century teenage language replace letters and Gothic novels as the tools through which information, gossip, fantasy, and misunderstanding circulate.
McDermid’s crime-writing instincts are useful precisely because the story is not truly a crime novel. She understands how to create the expectation that something dreadful may have happened and then exploit the gap between evidence and imagination. Cat behaves like an inexperienced amateur detective whose problem is not an inability to observe but a tendency to force observations into the dramatic narrative she already wants to believe.
As part of the Austen Project, Northanger Abbey stands independently from McDermid’s own recurring series. There is no connection with Karen Pirie, Tony Hill and Carol Jordan, Kate Brannigan, or her other crime characters, and McDermid wrote only this single Austen Project volume.
The project’s most interesting feature is therefore comparison rather than continuity. Four very different contemporary writers were asked to decide which elements of Austen could survive two centuries of social change. McDermid’s contribution finds its answer in imagination itself: technologies and fashions may change, but young people remain capable of mistaking stories for evidence, confusing excitement with experince, and discovering that ordinary human selfishness can be more consequential than the darkest mystery they imagined.