Northanger Abbey

Catherine Morland, raised on Mrs Radcliffe's terrors, arrives at a genuine abbey convinced it must hide a murdered wife — and misses the ordinary selfishness working on her in plain sight. Austen's comedy is about reading: what novels teach, and what they leave a young woman unable to see. The Gilded Library edition brings full-page plates of Regency interiors, candlelit abbeys and Bath promenades; the decoration takes up Catherine's own furniture — old chests, gothic arches, a stack of borrowed novels.