The Penguin Classics edition of Northanger Abbey is based on the first edition of 1818, and includes a chronology and additional suggestions for further reading. With its broad comedy and irrepressible, impressionable heroine, this is the most youthful and optimistic of Jane Austen's works. There, her imagination, influenced by Gothic romances, such as Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, Catherine imagines terrible crimes committed by General Tilney. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: rude, boorish John Thorpe, his flirtatious sister Isabella, who shares Catherine's love of sensational novels and intrigue, and sophisticated Eleanor and Henry Tilney, who invite her to their father's mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. During an eventful season at Bath, young, naïve Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. A witty exploration of the perils of mistaking fiction for reality, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is edited with an introduction and notes by Marylin Butler in Penguin Classics.
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