Northanger Abbey
- Written By Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey
- Jane Austen
Every heroine needs a villain. Catherine Morland is determined to find one.
Catherine Morland is 17 years old, apple-cheeked, and utterly unremarkable by the standards of the novels she loves. Raised on a steady diet of Gothic romances, she considers herself woefully unprepared for a heroine’s life, until family friends invite her to spend the winter at the fashionable resort town of Bath. Amid crowded ballrooms and promenades, Catherine meets the vivacious Isabella Thorpe, whose friendship arrives fast and full of flattery, and Henry Tilney, whose dry wit and genuine interest catch her off guard.
Isabella’s brother John Thorpe proves a persistent and unwelcome suitor, spinning stories about Catherine’s prospects that reach the wrong ears. When Henry’s sister Eleanor invites Catherine to stay at Northanger Abbey, the family’s nearby ancient country estate, Catherine’s imagination takes over. Locked chambers, midnight storms, and a domineering father supply all the raw material her beloved novelists promised. She goes looking for a monstrous secret. What she finds instead is a mistake she cannot easily undo, and a suitor who may never forgive it.
Northanger Abbey is Austen at her most playful and most exacting: a coming-of-age story disguised as a parody, and a parody that turns, without warning, into something sharper. Beneath its send-up of Gothic excess lies a clear-eyed account of what actually endangers a young woman: vanity, money, and the people willing to lie about both. Nearly two centuries on, it remains one of literature’s wittiest arguments for reading carefully, in fiction and in life.
“If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.”
About the Author
- Jane Austen
Jane Austen (1775–1817) grew up in Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children in a family that prized reading, performance, and wit in equal measure. She began writing as a teenager, filling notebooks with parody and social satire long before she considered herself a novelist in earnest.
Northanger Abbey was the first of her novels to reach a publisher and the last to reach readers. Austen sold the manuscript, then titled Susan, in 1803, but the publisher never printed it. She bought the rights back years later, revised the text, and renamed her heroine, but the book remained unpublished at her death in 1817.
It appeared in print that December, bound together with Persuasion in an edition arranged by her brother Henry. His prefatory “Biographical Notice” publicly identified Jane Austen as the author for the first time, her previous novels having all appeared anonymously. Written as a spirited tribute to the Gothic fiction she read as a girl, and published only after her death as a settled, mature social critic, Northanger Abbey captures Austen at both ends of her career at once: the young satirist testing her voice, and the novelist whose name the world was only just learning, but would never forget.
