Read in January 2021

★★★☆☆

The Thirteenth Tale is an ode to words, reading and storytelling in a narrative set around biographer Margaret Lea and her exclusive invitation to write the mysterious life story of elusive bestselling author, Vida Winter. Heavily inspired by Gothic and Victorian literature, Setterfield weaves an intimate and dramatic family story peppered with literary Easter eggs for avid readers.

From the beginning, The Thirteenth Tale perfectly pitches all of the elements of a novel to get lost in: Setterfield clearly writes as a lover of reading first and foremost, and Margaret is the embodiment of A Reader, working in her father’s bookshop, tucking herself away with cocoa and a book. The tone of the novel is instantly confiding, rich with cosy details as well as drops of uncanny uncertainty and eeriness.

There’s also a very heavy assumption on Setterfield’s part that readers are as preoccupied with Jane Eyre as she and her characters appear to be. I liked Jane Eyre but if I wanted to read Jane Eyre again, I would have just picked it up. I don’t necessarily hate intertextuality, but I feel like it should offer some form of commentary or adaptation (like Rebecca does with Jane Eyre, for example) but Setterfield straight up rehashes it to the extent that trying to stay so close to Brontë’s novel is detrimental to her own plot.

A little while after reading this one, I watched the adaptation starring Olivia Colman and Sophie Turner, and a few small tweaks in the details of the narrative smoothed out many of the structural and plotting issues I had with the novel. There were plenty of original and intriguing concepts to be found here on top of Setterfield’s inspiration by classic Gothic literature, but there were too many of them that the majority were left to peter out, and weakened rather than improved the novel overall.