Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey
31 chapters
3.85from 470,276 ratingson Goodreads
Catherine Morland goes to Bath for the season with more novels in her head than experience, makes a friend who is not one, and is invited to a genuine medieval abbey. Once there she sets about discovering the crime she is certain the general has committed. Austen's first completed novel, and her funniest about what reading does to a reader.
About the book
Sold to a publisher in 1803 for ten pounds, left unprinted for years, bought back, and published only in 1817 after Austen’s death, Northanger Abbey is the earliest completed of her novels. Catherine Morland, seventeen and perfectly ordinary, is taken to Bath by neighbours, acquires a false friend in Isabella Thorpe and a real one in Henry Tilney, and is then invited to stay at a genuine abbey. Having read a great many Gothic novels, she arrives expecting evidence of a crime, and sets about looking for it. The book is a parody of the Mysteries of Udolpho school and also a defence of novels — Austen breaks off to deliver one directly. The joke turns on Catherine being wrong about the abbey and right about the general, whose cruelty is financial and perfectly legal, which is the sharper point the Gothic machinery was hiding.
Characters
Catherine Morland — Protagonist
Seventeen, unremarkable and honest, with a head full of Gothic novels and no experience to check them against.
Henry Tilney — Clergyman
Amused, well-read and teasing, who knows exactly what Catherine has been imagining about his house.
Isabella Thorpe — False friend
Effusive, calculating, engaged to Catherine’s brother and looking about her the whole time.
John Thorpe — Suitor
A boastful young man who lies about horses, carriages and Catherine’s fortune, with consequences.
General Tilney — Antagonist
Henry’s father, courteous while he believes Catherine is rich and brutal the moment he learns otherwise.
Eleanor Tilney — Friend
Henry’s quiet sister, kept under her father’s thumb and the steadiest friend Catherine makes.
Mrs Allen — Chaperone
The neighbour who takes Catherine to Bath and whose entire mind is occupied by muslin.
About the author
Jane Austen (1775–1817) was an English novelist whose six completed books turned the ordinary business of courtship, money and family into some of the most exacting social comedy in the language. She wrote about a narrow world — the minor landed gentry of southern England — with an irony precise enough that readers still argue about where her sympathies lie. Her handling of a character's thoughts in the narrator's own voice shaped how novels have reported an inner life ever since. Her novels appeared anonymously in her lifetime, credited only to "A Lady"; they include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Persuasion.