3.75 stars

It’s been almost four months since I read this, and I already remember very little of what I thought about it. I admit that might be more of a reflection on my state of mind since early October, than a judgement on the book itself, but it does make this a short review!

My main gripe with this was the structure: epistolary and relating the past and present simultaneously, to the extent that it’s almost dual timelines. There is a huge amount of plot packed into this book, but the way it jumps around somehow makes it feel SO slow at the same time, and it took me a long time to get into the story because of that. Plus, there’s a certain reveal towards the end that makes the reason for the flashbacks seem so pointless that I felt retroactively even more annoyed at having had to struggle through it!

That said, I did really enjoy the overall story. Melinda Taub’s care for Austen’s work and her attention to detail are so evident, and I really appreciated her retelling choices. Lydia is still flighty and immature, but softened by kindness and a willingness to admit her mistakes, and aside from getting a little frustrated with her epistolary voice, I did enjoy following her as a heroine. The addition of witchcraft also felt really natural, and I had a lot of fun with Taub’s takes on Kitty Bennet and Wickham!

So all in all, even though I would have enjoyed this more as a linear narrative, I did still have a good time, and am even more keen to get hold of Melinda Taub’s first book now too!

The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch
Author: Melinda Taub


“It is a truth universally acknowledged that the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter must be a witch.”
Aunt Philips is a hedge witch, and recognising Lydia’s power, takes on her mentoring in witchcraft. She warns her that every witch must know that there is a law of sacrifice when using magic.
This is not another interpretation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’. It’s a reimagining of Lydia Bennet, as a witch, her adventures in Brighton and perhaps what her real thoughts might have been.
Its written from a few different points of view in epistolary style, via letters, and her own ‘confessions’.
It starts with Lydia as a child who has somehow gathered a cat as a familiar and glamoured her into a human sister, named Miss Kitty.
The two girls are walking one day when a creature, Wormenheart, grabs Kitty by the scruff of the neck and threatens to eat her, before eating Lydia.
Rather naively, she offers a ‘boon’ to be paid at a later date.
And that’s her first mistake of many.
Interspersed with the regular events at Netherfield and similar, on to her stay at Brighton with Harriet Forster, we also learn a lot about the various powers and witches of Britain.
The scene at the Brighton ball where Lydia meets Miss Lambe is priceless, especially in regards to the sonnet a young man has written for Miss Lambe. It’s this sort of humour that weaves throughout the book.
Taub has managed to capture the dry, ironic wit of Austen, with hints of modernity and a big splash of witchy magic.
Despite Lydia being very young, and rather shallow and vain, her observations of some characters and events are quite astute. She describes Bingley as ‘essentially a St. Bernard puppy.’ And I admit that made me laugh out loud.
Apart from her shortcomings, Lydia is also vulnerable when it comes to Wickham – and naive. Many forget in the original novel, she was only fifteen when a lot of it started.
When it comes to Georgiana, Darcy’s sister, her relationship, their friendship, it is honest, and she tries to help her friend when she faces danger.
We see a spark of the woman Lydia may have become. In fact, in retrospect, much of her story is poignant and I loved the way in which Taub expanded her character.
The use of the sea in Brighton in reference to magic and powers is handled really well, and in parts reminded me of a selkie based story from a few years back, possibly by Slatter, embracing the mythologies surrounding the sea.
When we finally get the story of Maria Lambe, recently arrived from Sainte-Josephine, it’s both painful and enlightening. I won’t spoil the context, but it’s powerful stuff.
The world building behind the polite regency facade is wonderful, from secret societies to demons and more, it’s engaging and up there with the world of witches created by Juno Dawson, despite the difference in timelines. There is most definitely social and historical critique in this.
Perhaps the best part about this however, is the chaotic relationship between Lydia and Wickham. The payoff at the end is definitely worth it.
This is imaginative, intelligent, funny, emotional and strangely, sort of sweet.
I do hope we get a follow up and more of the hierarchy of Brighton.

I am ever so slightly obsessed with Pride & Prejudice and so was really intrigued by the premise of Lydia Bennet as a witch.
This novel started off really strong, I loved the fact that it was written in the first person and the use of language was perfection, I could clearly envision Lydia from the BBC adaptation of P&P as I read each page.
I also marvelled at how cleverly Melinda Taub tied in witchcraft to certain elements of the Pride & Prejudice story we know and love. The explanation of the elopement was amazing, Wickham's secret was a fun twist and Kitty's storyline was sheer genius.

I must say the story waned for me after a few chapters: it wasn't a book that was impossible to put down at all. However, the pace at the end of the book picked up and reignited my interest and overall I did enjoy the story.

The amount of research that Taub must have done for this book has to be immense! The whole narrative is Lydia writing to a mystery person and, as she alludes to herself, it is less a letter and more a memoir, filled to the brim of snippets from both Pride & Prejudice and a nice little nod to Sanditon (an easter egg that I greatly appreciated).

Overall, I found The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch to be a really fun novel with such a clever concept. It wasn't a bingeable book in my opinion but sometimes we love a slow burner!

Thank you to Netgalley for a free copy of this e-book. All opinions given are my own.

This book was absolutely captivating. The characters are so well written, and you feel like you are part of their world while reading it. You can definitely tell the author researched well. Always been interested in the story of the witches and this one truly has all the right information. Loved it

So pretty much everyone knows the story of Pride and Prejudice right? There’s some pride and some prejudice and too many daughters and a wedding at the end but within all that there’s a major plot development that happens off book; the Brighton Incident. WFT went down in Brighton with Lydia and Wickham? How did that all come about? And why didn’t Elizabeth Bennet (the world’s worst judge of character) not see it coming? Well because, turns out, little Lydia’s a witch and Wickham is possessed by a demon. See it all makes much more sense now.
I enjoyed this a lot, it was very well written, not too many slips into American and it was true to style without being stodgy. Newcastle AKA Depressing Coal Town gets a raw deal though. It’s not that bad and everyone is very friendly there. Oh yeah also turns out Kitty is an actual Kitty, who knew?! 🤷‍♀️ This was a lot of fun and Lydia's not so bad after all.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

A clever and fantastical story from the perspective of Lydia Bennet, who has known since childhood that she's a witch. The way this story weaves its way around and through the familiar plot points of Pride and Prejudice, changing and subverting them as it goes is so well done, and the epistolary narrative is just perfect.

To centre a book around Lydia Bennet is such a great idea - and then you add witchcraft to Regency England and I was sold. This is such a fun read, doesn't take itself too seriously but also doesn't let down the die hard Austen fans. This would make a great Christmas gift, a cosy read and fun characters.

I am generally dubious about Jane Austin fan fiction, but The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch won me over totally! It is funny, clever and very, very entertaining.

If you enjoy historical fiction and if you're even a bit of a Jane Austin fan, do swallow your reluctance and give this a chance. Yes, there is witchcraft and all sorts of tomfoolery. The airheaded Lydia is secretly a witch, Wickham is a baddie, but not in the way you would expect, her sister Kitty is actually… a cat, and yes, it's all very nonsensical. But what a joy it is to read! It's inventive, fun, spirited and funny.

It also has a somewhat more serious side: we see Lydia's 'elopement' with the 'wicked' Mr Wickham from a more modern perspective, much more conscious of the fact that she was only 16 and not in a position to make much of a choice in the matter.

It should also be said that even if you have never read Pride and Prejudice, you can still enjoy The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch. It holds up on its own.

Most of all, the language and dialogue is - if not quite that of the inimitable Jane Austin herself - a pleasure to read, charming, fast paced, sharp and witty.

Thanks to the author, publisher and Netgalley for the ARC. All my reviews are 100% honest and unbiased, regardless of how I acquire the book.

It's a very entertaining and well written paranormal retelling of Pride and Prejudice. A well plotted and witty story, entertaining and enjoyable.
I liked the characters and the setting. The storytelling is good and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I really enjoyed this retelling of the a classic that I already love. While unlike pride and prejudice this book focusses on the most rebellious Bennet sister, Lydia.

This book was a lot of fun as it faithfully followed the events in the original book that we all know while adding a magical edge and giving us more information about characters that we may have passed by and not given much consideration to in Pride and Prejudice. It also makes Austen's work more approachable; when I first read Pride and Prejudice as a teenager I can't say that I loved it, however this version makes it a lot more fun and enjoyable and also makes me want to re-read the original. It also makes me actually like Lydia, which I'm not sure anyone did in Austen's book.

This is an incredibly entertaining, funny read for anyone who enjoys regency books and cozy fantasy!

This exceeded all expectations, come for the Jane Austen inspiration, but stay for Lydia Bennett, Witch!

I'm so glad I read this, I don't think the cover does this justice, and maybe because of that, I wasn't expecting the story to be so inventive or engaging, and mistakenly thought that it would rely too heavily on the source material as many other Austen-retellings do, peppering a newish perspective with original quotes and plot points.

This does so much more than that! Love the whole idea of Kitty in this book, and love what the two girls, Kitty and Lydia, mean to each other, as well as Wickham's role and the witchiness of it all. I thought I'd hate Lydia but I grew to love her and her new story, and for all we know, this is what really happened!

A perfect witchy season read.

I would like to thank netgalley and Quercus Books for a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Really clever idea, but it dragged.

This was everything I wanted it to be. Magic, regency society and a nice scattering of Jane Austen. It was the perfect blend of a regency novel full of scandal and a fantasy novel of witchcraft and danger. The author also captured Lydia's voice perfectly. There was not a moment of this book where I wasn't entirely convinced this was the same Lydia from Pride and Prejudice. And this is the Jane Austen inspired book the I've seen that goes into what happens to Lydia after the scandal.

I loved how the magic fit in perfectly to regency society. It was easy to go from a ball with women in tight dresses dancing with suiters to a coven meeting where naked witches danced around a bonfire. The style it was written made it feel completely natural. As though there was witchcraft in Jane Austen all along!

The story itself was skilfully written. Everything fit perfectly with the events of the original text. I was so excited to see how it would all end and there was plenty of suspense and mystery created throughout the novel. The ending was perfect, it was clever, unexpected and it just fit so well.

Lydia Bennet sister of Elizabeth, protagonist of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice recounts her life story and the fact that she is a witch in the fabulous retelling!
I really loved lydia as a main character. She has been given a lot more substance than Auste'ns character although Austen's voice can clearly be heard in the narrative.
This is a fabulously witchy retelling that any fan of Austen will love.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter must be a witch.’

My thanks to Quercus Books Jo Fletcher Books for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch’ by Melinda Taub.

This is a lively reimagining of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ in which Miss Lydia Bennet puts pen to paper to relate the events and aftermath of the classic story from her own perspective.

We all know that the five Bennet daughters suffer from the fact that their father’s estate is entailed only to male heirs and that their mother is anxious that they all make advantageous marriages.

However, Lydia has entirely different concerns. She is a witch, an apprentice to her aunt, Mrs Philips. In addition, her best-loved sister, Kitty, is a barn cat and her familiar, though Kitty is seen by everyone as a human girl and can transform at will.

“Many a lonely young girl makes a companion of a pet. What happened next, though, was far from ordinary. I made believe that my cat was my sister, and my family indulged me, as one does with an imaginative and spoilt child. … Kitty this, Kitty that, was the refrain in our house, until one day, they were not humoring me—they saw her, too.”

Then there is Wickham who is every bit as wicked as portrayed in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and more so given his origins! Alongside the usual pretty frocks, bonnets, and balls, the story is packed with magic, witches and covens. There’s even a dragon and the quest for a powerful magical jewel.

Lydia’s account does tend to jump about in time and location though she is portrayed as a flibbertigibbet as she had been in the original novel.

In the Author’s Note Melinda Taub writes: “This book is an amalgam of history, folklore, one and a half Jane Austen novels, and a bunch of stuff I made up from whole cloth.”

I was pleased to see the inclusion of Miss Maria Lambe, who had appeared simply as Miss Lambe in Austen’s unfinished novel ‘Sanditon’. Miss Lambe was a wealthy heiress from the West Indies and was Austen’s only Black character. In this reimagining she plays an important role in Lydia’s life.

Melinda Taub points out that Miss Lambe’s situation in her novel was based on fact as “at this time mixed-race heirs were often disinherited by English courts in favor of their white relatives.”

Overall, I found ‘The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch’ an entertaining Regency romp with added fantasy elements. It held my attention throughout and I enjoyed it very much.

This is an excellent blurb, which gives you the facts, and some hints, and leaves all the rest to the author. I was slightly worried that this would be a reimagining of P&P and I wouldn’t like it. What it turns out to be is Lydia’s full and frank confession of what really went on, some of it entirely unbeknown to her family. She even explains how she, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, manages to appear as daughter number five. And all Kitty’s upsets and sniffing? Well, it’s a familiar enough tale.

I loved nearly all of it. The characterisations are perfect and wholly in keeping with the people I know and love from the book (and the BBC series). Lydia bounces about a bit, as you might expect, from the early events you know to later ones that have great consequences. She just gives some marvellous insights into the underlying motivations of characters you thought quite shallow. Not a bit of it!

We jump about the time line rather too much for my taste. Although it’s fun to wake up with her in Newcastle, waiting for her rake of a ‘husband’, we quickly change to past history. Then we come back to what could be a much stronger story of Miss Georgiana’s hexing. There are plenty of adventures to be had before we finally arrive back at that, and by the time we do, it seems to be polished off as a sort of afterthought. Ms Taub resorts to an epistolary approach to sorting out who did what for whom in the denouement. I found that quite confusing, since she has been using ‘you’ to address the reader at times, and now I had to work out who ‘you’ was in each letter. Attention drooped.

Other than that, this is a marvellous addition to the P&P world, with details at the back of evidence the author used for various parts of it.

It definitely sparkles and I thoroughly enjoyed it, save for the long-winded ending. Others may prefer it that way!

Lydia Bennet, a character whose actions are pivotal in Pride & Prejudice & yet we learn relatively little about her character beyond what other characters tell us. This reimaging of P&P sees Lydia relate the events from her point of view through the medium of writing her thoughts down in a book. In this world, Lydia is the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter (three older sisters having died as children) & therefore a witch, whilst Kitty is revealed to be her feline familiar bewitched to appear human in front of others. Lydia's quest to improve & use her magic leads her into all kinds of mischief & dangerous situations.

The narrative is all from Lydia's point of view apart from a few letters at the end which are from another character who appears in the book. It seems like it should be a light retelling with the focus on magic, but the author manages to cover some weightier subjects: racism, sexism/misogyny in society, the confining of women to the domestic sphere & marriage, & a society where a fifteen year old girl would be married off to an older man for the sake of her (& her female relatives') reputation whilst his would eventually carry on as before. Jane & Elizabeth are mentioned but sadly do not appear on the page, although just about every one else does & Georgiana has a bigger role here. Overall it was a nice enough read but it didn't really grab & hold my attention as I thought it would. 3.5 stars (rounded up)

TWs: blood magic, brief sentence about animal sacrifice, mild sexual content but mostly it happens off page.

My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Quercus Books/Jo Fletcher Books, for the opportunity to read an ARC.

Melinda Taub delivers a book based on the youngest Bennet sister, Lydia, and takes the story off in a direction that is both fun and amusing. This is an entertaining romp of a story centred around witchcraft in Recency England.

It is very much a book that does not take itself too seriously. Austen purists may not care for the liberties taken with the characters. However, read as a book that is intended to be read as a lively, witty and enjoyable retelling of a familiar story, it cannot fail to please.

The author has taken a familiar tale and spun a whole new perspective of the story from it. The characters are all recognizable from the original story, but seen through Lydia's eyes we observe a very different perspective.

A wonderful book for any fan of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. This tells the story of Lydia Bennet and her witchy ways. This is a fun book to read and and a change from the wonderful classic novel we all know and love. And I think that is what makes this book such a hit.

Love Lydia in this story, the writing is wonderful, the book is fun and entertaining to read and I really didn't want to put it down. I loved it. A great read and one which I highly recommend.

Thank you NetGalley and Quercus Books for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.