Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey is the story of na?ve but sweetly appealing Catherine Morland, a willing victim of the 19th-century craze for Gothic literature who is determined to see herself as the heroine of a dark and thrilling romance. Northanger Abbey is both a perfectly aimed literary parody and a withering satire of the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century. When Catherine is invited to Northanger Abbey, the grand though forbidding ancestral seat of her suitor, Henry Tilney, she finds herself embroiled in a real drama of misapprehension, mistreatment, and mortification, until common sense and humor--and a crucial clarification of Catherine's financial status--puts all to right. Written in 1798 but not published until after Austen's death in 1817, Northanger Abbey is characteristically clearheaded and strong, and infinitely subtle in its comedy.