Northanger Abbey

Catherine Morland is seventeen, the unremarkable daughter of a country clergyman, and an avid reader of Gothic novels. Invited to the fashionable spa town of Bath, she is swept into a world of assembly rooms and new friends — the witty clergyman Henry Tilney, the scheming Isabella and John Thorpe, and Henry's imperious father, General Tilney, who invites her to the family's ancient seat under a mistaken notion of her fortune.

Arriving at Northanger Abbey with her imagination steeped in The Mysteries of Udolpho, Catherine is primed to find sliding panels, bloodstained secrets, and a murdered wife behind every locked door. Her Gothic suspicions are gloriously, mortifyingly wrong — and yet her instinct that something is off about the General proves, in the book's deepest irony, entirely correct.

Northanger Abbey is Austen's youngest and most high-spirited work, a loving parody of the Gothic romance carried by an intrusive, teasing narrator who steps out of the story to mock its conventions — and, in the famous “defence of the novel,” to stake a fierce claim for the form she would go on to master. Drafted in the 1790s, sold to a publisher who never printed it, and finally published only after her death, it is a comedy about reading: about the difference between being moved by a story and being deceived by one.

Beneath the comedy lies a sharp portrait of the marriage market, where fortunes are schemed for and a young woman's future can turn on a misheard rumour — and where the real villain, it turns out, needs no dungeon at all.