In the Library
Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen, 1818
- Form
- Form Novel
- Reading time
- Reading time 5.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 32
- Length
- Length 77k words
£1.99
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About the book
Catherine Morland arrives at Northanger Abbey certain that horror waits behind every locked door, because she has read every novel Ann Radcliffe wrote and expects the world to supply her a mystery to match them. She finds a cabinet, a manuscript sealed by candlelight at midnight, and by morning discovers it is a laundry list. Jane Austen wrote this first of her novels and published it last, and it is her funniest reckoning with what fiction does to a reader's eye. It does not mock Catherine for loving Gothic romance so much as it proves her instincts right in a different register entirely. The true menace at the Abbey is not a murdered wife behind a curtain. It is General Tilney, who courts Catherine's company while he thinks her rich, then, learning she is not, turns her out alone and without a carriage to travel seventy miles home unescorted. Austen keeps her joke light until the precise moment she needs you to feel its teeth, and you will.