Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey is a novel by Jane Austen, completed in 1799 and published after her death in 1817 together with Persuasion. It is a coming-of-age story and, at the same time, a satire of the Gothic novels that were fashionable when it was written.

Catherine Morland is seventeen, naive and fond of novels, and she is pushed into society for the first time with a head full of Ann Radcliffe. She makes friends quickly, acquires two possible suitors and begins to learn how little of what she reads and imagines is any use in judging actual people. Invited to an abbey, she expects the sort of secrets a Gothic heroine would be delighted to uncover, and what she finds instead is a more ordinary and more painful kind of mystery, one that involves money, property and the way a family can quietly decide that a young woman does not matter.

Austen's jokes are aimed at the Gothic novel and at the society that consumes it, and the book refers constantly to the fiction of the period. It reached print only because her brother arranged for the manuscript to be published after she died.