Austen tells the story of Catherine Morland and her dangerously sweet nature, innocence, and sometime self-delusion. Though Austen's fallible heroine is repeatedly drawn into scrapes while vacationing at Bath and during her subsequent visit to Northanger Abbey, Catherine eventually triumphs, blossoming into a discerning woman who learns truths about love, life, and the heady power of literature.

On a moonlit road in Hampstead, Walter Hartright is accosted by a stranger dressed from head to toe in white, who asks the way to London. Shortly thereafter he is overtaken by a carriage in pursuit of this mysterious woman who has evidently escaped from an asylum. He then unwinds a story of abduction, madness, false identity and shameful family secret.

"Marlinchen and her two sisters live with their wizard father in a city shifting from magic to industry. As Oblya's last true witches, she and her sisters are little more than a tourist trap as they treat their clients with archaic remedies and beguile them with nostalgic charm. Marlinchen spends her days divining secrets in exchange for rubles and trying to placate her tyrannical, xenophobic father, who keeps his daughters sequestered from the outside...