Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey, generally agreed to be Jane Austen’s earliest major work, grew out of her distaste for the absurdities of the novels of her time, and in particular for the conventions of the ‘Gothic novels’ with their impossibly perfect heroines and unnatural events. At Northanger Abbey Jane Austen’s charmingly imperfect heroine, Catherine Morland, meets all the trappings of Gothic horror and imagines the worst. Fortunately she has at hand her own fundamental good sense and the irresistible but unsentimental hero, Henry Tilney. Disaster does eventually strike, in the real world as distinct from the romantic one of her imagination, but without spoiling for too long the gay, good-humoured atmosphere of this most delightful of books.