Northanger Abbey, written during the same period as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, represents Jane Austen's genius at its freshest and most enchanting. It grew out of her distaste for the absurdities of the novels of her time and in particular, for the conventions of the ‘Gothic novels’ with their impossibly perfect heroines and unnatural events. Young Catherine Morland, the heroine of the novel, is the mistakenly invited guest at an isolated, and quite mysterious, country manor. There the charming, young husband-seeker falls in love with Henry Tilney, son of the eccentric General Tilney, and is fortunate to gain his father’s approval, which is founded upon the exaggerated report of her parents’ wealth. Catherine is invited to Northanger Abbey, the medieval seat of the Tilneys. Somewhat unbalanced by a too assiduous reading of Mrs Radcliffe’s novels, she imagines numerous gruesome secrets surrounding the General and his house. Before Catherine’s difficulties are resolved, the reader witnesses the romantic chase in all its prescribed ritual, and its prime motivations-ambition, pleasure, greed, power, self-interest.... love. Jane Austen’s wonderful comedy of errors has become one of the best loved of all novels.
