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Catherine Morland, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a country clergyman, is no one's idea of a heroine, but she has read a great many Gothic novels. Taken…
Catherine Morland, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a country clergyman, is no one's idea of a heroine, but she has read a great many Gothic novels. Taken to Bath by family friends, she makes friends with the flirtatious Isabella Thorpe, is pestered by Isabella's boastful brother John, and meets the witty Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor. Invited to their family home, Northanger Abbey, she imagines that its stern owner, General Tilney, murdered or imprisoned his wife, and searches the abbey for secrets until Henry gently brings her back to reality, shortly before the General shows a real cruelty of his own.
Context and significance
Jane Austen wrote the novel in the late 1790s and sold it to a publisher in 1803, but it appeared only after her death, in December 1817, together with Persuasion. It is her most playful book, a parody of the novels Catherine loves and also a defence of the novel itself. The book Catherine cannot put down is Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.
About the author
Jane Austen (1775–1817) grew up in a crowded rectory in the Hampshire village of Steventon, the seventh of eight children, writing comic sketches to amuse her family. She never married, lived quietly in Bath and then in a cottage at Chawton, and published her novels anonymously, signed only 'By a Lady'. She died in Winchester at forty-one.
Her six novels, from Pride and Prejudice to Emma and Persuasion, turn the small world of country families, marriages and money into sharp, funny studies of character. Her ironic narration, slipping in and out of her heroines' thoughts, changed the way novels are written.