Jane Austen's renowned satire about a teenage girl who longs to explore the world and become the hero of her own story-with an introduction by Caroline Levander
"Jane Austen is the Rosetta stone of literature."-Anna Quindlen
"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine."
Thus begins the earliest of Jane Austen's six major novels, Northanger Abbey, which remained unpublished until after Austen's death in 1817. A deliciously witty satire of popular Gothic romances, it is perhaps Austen's lightest, most delightful excursion into a young woman's world.
Catherine Morland, an unlikely heroine-unlikely because she is so ordinary-forsakes her English village for the pleasures and perils of Bath. There, among a circle of Austen's wonderfully vain, dissembling, and fashionable characters, she meets a potential suitor, Henry Tilney. But with her imagination fueled by melodramatic novels, Catherine turns a visit to his home, Northanger Abbey, into a hunt for dark family secrets. The result is a series of hilarious social gaffes and harsh awakenings that for all of Austen's youthful exuberance nevertheless conveys her mature vision of literature and life-and the consequences of mistaking one for the other.
