illustration from 1833 edition of Northanger Abbey

Castle Wrath – Not Your Mother’s Jane Austen – Now Available

Karin Kallmaker Book News, Castle Wrath, Novellas

illustration from 1833 edition of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Burning curiosity. Wild imagination. Put them together and the breathless discoveries of an ingenue who reads far too many lurid novels come to life. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen is all that and more. The dizzy chapters of young Catherine’s exploration of the Abbey are glorious fun to read. Cabinets that lure her with their tantalizing closed doors. The secrets! The treasures! Things that go bump in the night!

She had not been used to feel alarm from wind, but now every blast seemed fraught with awful intelligence… What could it contain? To whom could it relate? By what means could it have been so long concealed? And how singularly strange that it should fall to her lot to discover it! – Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

As most readers know, Northanger Abbey isn’t the first time Jane Austen inspired me to pen a very lesbian version of her work. A year prior I wrote Just Like That (2005), setting Pride and Prejudice in California’s vineyards. It’s not as if I’m alone in thinking Austen is great for lesbian adaptations. Autostraddle’s brilliantly excellent mash up of pulp novels and Jane Austen is one of the things that makes life worth living.

classic pulp novel art with Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen as book

Castle Wrath was written for the anthology (Stake through the Heart, Bella Books 2006). After deciding that a story about an ingenue who sees horror around every corner was where I wanted to go, well, I had to get a bit naughty with it.

Castle Wrath is about half the length of a novel at 31,000 words. Plus there’s smutty good fun when breathless Brittany Brannigan discovers (gasp!) a hotbed of lesbian porn production (shocking!) and other things that go bump (and bump!) in the night. And then there’s the decidedly attractive and very annoying caretaker’s daughter always being right about, well, everything.

Buy Linkapalooza

cover, Castle Wrath by Karin Kallmaker

Available for the first time in digital editions at:

Enjoy, and please leave an honest review for other readers. If you have any issues with formatting please let us know via contentsprite(-at-)kallmaker.com.