Northanger Abbey

At seventeen, Catherine Morland is invited to accompany the Allens to Bath for the winter season. In Bath, Catherine meets and befriends the Tilneys and the Thorpes. Through her relationships with these families, Catherine learns the true value of love and friendship, as Henry Tilney and John Thorpe vie for her affections and the true character of her friend, Isabella, is revealed.

Although it was the first of Jane Austen’s novels to be completed for publication, Northanger Abbey was not published until after the author’s death in 1817. It had previously been sold to a London bookseller in 1803 who had decided not to publish the work. Austen’s brother re-purchased Northanger Abbey in 1817, at which point it was revised and published at the end of that year.

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Though Northanger Abbey is one of Jane Austen's earliest novels, it was not published until after her death--well after she'd established her reputation with works such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Of all her novels, this one is the most explicitly literary in that it is primarily concerned with books and with readers. In it, Austen skewers the novelistic excesses of her day made popular in such 18th-century Gothic potboilers as Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Decrepit castles, locked rooms, mysterious chests, cryptic notes, and tyrannical fathers all figure into Northanger Abbey, but with a decidedly satirical twist. Consider Austen's introduction of her heroine: we are told on the very first page that "no one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine." The author goes on to explain that Miss Morland's father is a clergyman with "a considerable independence, besides two good livings--and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters." Furthermore, her mother does not die giving birth to her, and Catherine herself, far from engaging in "the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush" vastly prefers playing cricket with her brothers to any girlish pastimes.

Catherine grows up to be a passably pretty girl and is invited to spend a few weeks in Bath with a family friend. While there she meets Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor, who invite her to visit their family estate, Northanger Abbey. Once there, Austen amuses herself and us as Catherine, a great reader of Gothic romances, allows her imagination to run wild, finding dreadful portents in the most wonderfully prosaic events. But Austen is after something more than mere parody; she uses her rapier wit to mock not only the essential silliness of "horrid" novels, but to expose the even more horrid workings of polite society, for nothing Catherine imagines could possibly rival the hypocrisy she experiences at the hands of her supposed friends. In many respects Northanger Abbey is the most lighthearted of Jane Austen's novels, yet at its core is a serious, unsentimental commentary on love and marriage, 19th-century British style. --Alix Wilber

At seventeen, Catherine Morland is invited to accompany the Allens to Bath for the winter season. In Bath, Catherine meets and befriends the Tilneys and the Thorpes. Through her relationships with these families, Catherine learns the true value of love and friendship, as Henry Tilney and John Thorpe vie for her affections and the true character of her friend, Isabella, is revealed.

Although it was the first of Jane Austen’s novels to be completed for publication, Northanger Abbey was not published until after the author’s death in 1817. It had previously been sold to a London bookseller in 1803 who had decided not to publish the work. Austen’s brother re-purchased Northanger Abbey in 1817, at which point it was revised and published at the end of that year.

HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.