Northanger Abbey

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Thus begins the earliest of Jane Austen’s six major novels, Northanger Abbey, which remained unpublished until after Austen’s death in 1817.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.