27

Northanger Abbey

Login to track your reading progress

Login Now

Catherine Morland leaves her quiet family home for Bath with a lively appetite for novels and little experience of fashionable society. Balls, walks and new friendships promise the kind of adventure she has mostly encountered in books. She is drawn to the witty Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor, while Isabella and John Thorpe introduce her to a more forceful style of friendship, one in which compliments and invitations may serve interests she does not yet recognise.

An invitation to the Tilney family home seems to offer an even greater adventure. Northanger Abbey has the name, history and atmosphere to excite a reader of Gothic fiction. Catherine begins to interpret its rooms and its owner's behaviour through the conventions of the frightening stories she loves. Her imagination supplies explanations before her experience has taught her how to test them.

Austen turns this confusion into a comedy about reading both books and people. Catherine's mistakes are amusing, but the novel does not simply dismiss her favourite stories or treat imagination as a fault. Its narrator vigorously defends the pleasures and intelligence of fiction while exposing the pretensions of those who consider novel-reading beneath them. Catherine must learn that everyday selfishness can be serious even when it bears little resemblance to a Gothic villain's crimes.

Northanger Abbey combines courtship with a young woman's education in sincerity, money and social performance. Henry's teasing intelligence, Eleanor's kindness and General Tilney's imposing hospitality give Catherine different kinds of evidence to interpret. The story's energy comes from the gap between what she expects and what is happening around her. As that gap narrows, Austen offers a generous account of growing wiser without losing an open heart. The result is a playful, observant novel about the stories people consume, the stories they tell themselves and the care needed to distinguish them.