A reclusive, dying novelist famous for a lifetime of invented backstories finally summons a bookseller's daughter to transcribe her true life story — a Gothic tale of twins, a burned house, and a governess that echoes Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
Books mentioned in The Thirteenth Tale (12)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë: “My hand hovered instead over the old favorites: The Woman in White, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre… But it was no good.”
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: “My hand hovered instead over the old favorites: The Woman in White, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre… But it was no good.”
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins: “"The Woman in White." "Middlemarch," I supplied.”
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen: “"Wuthering Heights—you've read that?" 'Mm-hmm.' 'And Jane Eyre?' 'Mm.' "Sense and Sensibility?" 'Hm-m.'”
Middlemarch by George Eliot: “"The Woman in White." "Middlemarch," I supplied.”
The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: “In a vigorous scrawl, he had inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes.”
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole: “Not only Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Woman in White, but The Castle of Otranto, Lady Audley's Secret, The Spectre Bride.”
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: “I understood the mysteries of Hester's wandering bookmark, the appearance of The Turn of the Screw and the disappearance of her diary.”
The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: “I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life...”
Hard Times by Charles Dickens: “Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White.”
The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope: “Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White.”
Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon: “Let us return to Lady Audley and her secret, shall we?”