The Black Feathers is an eerie Gothic novel, a perfect book to curl up with indoors on a cold, dark night.

It’s 1852 and Edward Stonehouse is returning to Guardbridge, his family estate on the Yorkshire Moors, bringing with him his second wife, Annie, and their baby boy, John. The couple have been married for a year, but this is Annie’s first visit to the house and she is full of apprehension, having been warned by a friend that Guardbridge has a reputation as ‘a place where bad things happen’.

As Annie begins to explore the narrow hallways and dimly-lit staircases of her new home, she finds traces everywhere of Edward’s first wife, Evie, and their young son, Jacob. She longs to know what happened to them, but Edward has made it clear that the subject is not to be discussed, so she turns instead to the other inhabitants of the house – Edward’s sister, Iris, and her old nurse, Mrs North. But here Annie only finds yet more mysteries. Can Iris really communicate with the dead, as she claims, and why does she refuse to venture outside the walls of Guardbridge? And what are the black feathers appearing around the house? Is it true that they mark the spot where a ghostly presence has visited?

The Black Feathers has some obvious similarities with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, as well as a setting reminiscent of Wuthering Heights, but there are enough original elements to make it an enjoyable read in its own right and not too derivative of older classics. I found Annie a likeable character, but Iris intrigued me more, with her passion for spiritualism, interest in taxidermy and the agoraphobia that has kept her indoors for so many years. I wanted to know what had happened to make into the person she became, and although we do eventually find out, Netley keeps us wondering before beginning to reveal the truth. Edward is equally mysterious – seen through Annie’s eyes, he is distant and aloof, a man she has married through necessity and hasn’t yet learned to trust. When we see things from his sister’s perspective, there are hints that he could be quite a different man to the one Annie thinks she has married, but again, we have to wait to find out what sort of person Edward really is and what happened to his first wife and child.

The novel is atmospheric and creepy in places, particularly when Annie begins to see some ghostly apparitions, but I didn’t find it too frightening, which is good as I don’t want to be terrified when I’m reading at bedtime! I felt that the final few chapters let the book down slightly – the unravelling of the house’s secrets involves too much exposition and long stretches of dialogue – but the final twist is clever and unexpected. Rebecca Netley has written another ghost story, The Whistling, which I haven’t read but would like to, having enjoyed this one.

Thanks to Michael Joseph for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 47/50 for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.