Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey is a novel written by Jane Austen. The bookseller Crosby & Co bought the manuscript in 1803 and then never printed it; her brother bought it back years later, and the novel appeared only in December 1817, after her death, in the same four volumes as Persuasion. It was the first of her novels to be sold to a publisher, though Sense and Sensibility was the first to reach print.

This novel tells the story of the visit of Catherine Morland together with her friends, the Allen couple, to the city of Bath in England. The protagonist, only seventeen years old, takes advantage of her visit by going to dances with friends like Isabella Thorpe. There she is pursued by two very different men: John Thorpe, her brother's boorish friend, and Henry Tilney, a young clergyman who teases her about her reading.

Henry Tilney is a cultured man with broad knowledge of literature and the world in general. Catherine befriends his sister Eleanor, and the Tilneys invite her to their father's house, Northanger Abbey. Full of the gothic novels she devours, she talks herself into believing that the general murdered his wife, and is humiliated when Henry finds out...

The novel is a parody of the gothic fiction that was in fashion when Austen wrote it, and at the same time a comedy about the absurd complications of society and about marrying for love rather than for money.