The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

The setting, as well as some of the characters, lead to several very eerie moments when I found myself holding my breath. Both estates are isolated and punctuated by mysterious happenings, even ghosts. Both the memories and the contemporary story take place among gothic settings: the dilapidated Anglefield family seat and Miss Winter’s vast estate amidst the moorlands of Northern England. This second plot takes the reader (and Margaret) back in time to unravel an ominous mystery. Parallel to the story of Margaret and Miss Winter then, Setterfield weaves in a second plotline through the stories Winter shares with her would be biographer.

Winter’s life is as mysterious as the strange gothic mood that quickly emerges in the book. As Miss Winter, the beloved novelist of whose personal life so little is known, faces old age and death, she determines to tell her story she has selected Margaret to be her audience and subsequent biographer. She is startled, then, to find herself summoned by the most famous English writer of the age, Vida Winter. Margaret is a rare book seller’s daughter and an amateur biographer, and it seems from the first, a bit a recluse. The Thirteenth Tale is a first-person story told from young Margaret Lea’s point of view. But the parallels between the two are not overly done, and The Thirteenth Tale incorporates plenty of other literary devices as it leads its reader down a windy path, uncovering truth and connecting the dots in a mystery of myriad layers. Yes, there is a mysterious family estate said to be haunted. Copies of the book itself appear throughout the story, as do character, plot, and setting parallels.

If Once Upon A River drew upon the Victorian novel for inspiration, The Thirteenth Tale is an homage of sorts to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This fall, I finally picked up The Thirteenth Tale and its gothic tone felt perfectly suited to the season in which I was reading. Ever since reading that masterfully written novel, Dickensian in style, I have longed to read her first novel: The Thirteenth Tale (2006). Her most recent novel, Once Upon A River (2018) was one of the first I reviewed on LitReaderNotes nearly three years ago it is a captivating and haunting story that I utterly loved. One such spinner of tales is Diane Setterfield. Some story tellers captivate readers with the atmospheric moods their stories take on, with the dynamic characters-both good and bad and complicated, like all of us-that populate their pages, with the clever plot twists, the unexpected sown into the story seamlessly.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield