She is eventually invited to stay a few weeks at their estate, Northanger Abbey.

It commenced as so many other Austen works do-with a heroine in somewhat reduced financial straits hoping to make a match-but quickly pivoted to something different.Ĭatherine befriends the Tilney family, whom she meets in Bath, and there is an evident spark between her and Henry Tilney, the son of the family. To a fourteen-year-old in South Florida with no knowledge of the nineteenth century fervor for Gothic novels-I doubt I’d ever even heard the phrase before-the book was a bit of a peculiarity. My copy of Northanger Abbey was in a combined set, along with Austen’s unfinished works ( The Watsons and Sanditon), and this volume was saved for last, after I’d finished her more popular books. My own relationship with Northanger Abbey began at a young age in my early teens, I methodically worked my way through Austen’s entire, all-too-short backlist. The success of Austen’s book as a satire is dependent upon readers’ familiarity with the tropes of the genre that Austen was parodying-one which, at the time, was an enormous cultural force. Radcliffe’s most famous book, The Mysteries of Udolpho, was a runaway bestseller, and it is within this context that we meet Cathine Morland, Northanger Abbey’s Gothic-novel-reading heroine. Radcliffe’s novels are perfect examples of the hallmarks of Gothic fiction, featuring spooky atmospheres, a creeping feeling of unease, and oftentimes an eerie castle or estate as a setting her works also resolutely center women as the heroines, set firmly against male villains. Austen was writing in the heyday of Gothic novels a modern reader’s mind might think of the Bronte sisters when they consider Gothics, but this was an earlier era, when the works of authors like Ann Radcliffe were wildly popular.

Northanger abbey by jane austen