Northanger Abbey

By Jane Austen, Marilyn Butler

Nothing about Catherine Morland, a country clergyman's daughter from a family of ten children, suggests that she was meant to be the heroine of a novel, and her narrator says so with some amusement. At seventeen she is good-natured, unworldly and devoted to the Gothic romances of the day, and when the Allens, the wealthy neighbours who own most of the land around her Wiltshire village, take her with them to Bath for six weeks, she goes out into society for the first time. There she is introduced to Henry Tilney, a quick-witted young clergyman who teases her about her reading and the journal he assumes she keeps, and is swept into an intense friendship with Isabella Thorpe, whose brother John is a boastful friend of Catherine's own brother. Austen's own note to the reader says the book was completed in 1803 and then sold to a publisher who never brought it out. It is both a comedy of a girl's first season and a parody of the fiction she loves.

Description community-written - CC BY-SA 4.0.

Series

• Jane Austen's Novels - book 5

Guides

• Chapter-by-chapter recap of Northanger Abbey
• Northanger Abbey character guide

Genres: classics, comedy-humor, coming-of-age, gothic, horror, literary-fiction, romance, romantic-comedy

Recordings