Northanger Abbey

Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her acquaintances rude boorish John Thorpe his flirtatious sister Isabella who shares Catherine's love of novels and intrigue and sophisticated Eleanor and Henry Tilney who invite her to their father's mysterious house Northanger Abbey.|Jane Austen the daughter of a clergyman was born in Hampshire in 1775 and later lived in Bath and the village of Chawton. As a child and teenager she wrote brilliantly witty stories for her family's amusement as well as a novella Lady Susan. Her first published novel was Sense and Sensibility which appeared in 1811 and was soon followed by Pride and Prejudice Mansfield Park and Emma. Austen died in 1817 and Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously in 1818.|'Jane Austen is a genius and Northanger Abbey is hugely underrated' Martin AmisWith its irrepressible heroine and playful literary games Northanger Abbey is the most youthful and optimistic of Jane Austen's novels. It tells the story of young impressionable Catherine Morland whose first experience of fashionable society introduces her to the thrills of Gothic romances and to the sophisticated Tilneys who invite her to their family home Northanger Abbey. But there influenced by novels of horror and intrigue Catherine begins to think that terrible crimes are being committed and her imagination threatens to run away with her.Edited with an Introduction by MARILYN BUTLER