Northanger Abbey
€0,00
First published posthumously in December 1817, Northanger Abbey follows Catherine Morland, a lively and rather inexperienced young woman whose love of Gothic fiction shapes her expectations of the world. Taken to Bath for a season of dances, new acquaintances and social discoveries, she befriends the charming Isabella Thorpe and meets the witty Henry Tilney, before an invitation to his family home sets her imagination running. At Northanger Abbey, Catherine begins to suspect that the house conceals dark secrets, but the realities she encounters prove more complicated than the terrors of her favourite novels.
Written in the late 1790s and revised years later, Austen’s earliest completed novel is both a playful coming-of-age story and a spirited defence of fiction, particularly the Gothic novels so often dismissed by contemporary critics. With affectionate irony, she explores the influence of reading, the difference between appearance and reality, and the education of a young woman learning to judge character for herself. Its self-aware narrator, lively social comedy and mischievous treatment of Gothic conventions make Northanger Abbey one of Austen’s most distinctive and quietly radical works.
From the book
“A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
On Northanger Abbey
“Northanger Abbey holds some of her greatest wisdom on books, reading, and writing.”
— Devoney Looser, Persuasions On-Line