Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

While enjoying a six weeks' stay in fashionable Bath, the young and callow Catherine Morland is introduced to the delights of high society. Thanks to a new literary diet of the sensational and the macabre, Catherine travels to Northanger Abbey fully expecting to become embroiled in a Gothic adventure of intrigue and suspense - and, once there, soon begins to form the most gruesome and improbable theories about the exploits of its occupants.An early work, but published posthumously, Northanger Abbey is a parody of the Gothic genre typified by the novels of Ann Radcliffe, as well as a witty comedy of manners in the style of Jane Austen's later novels and, ultimately, an enchanting love story.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist whose works are among the most popular novels ever written. Her keen eye for social tension, and ear for taut, witty dialogue have delighted readers for centuries, while her novels have maintained historical importance through their analysis of the dependence of women on marriage to gain social standing and security. She has been widely adapted for both stage and screen, and continues to be among the most widely-read of late-18th-/early 19th-century writers.

As a creative realist, giving to her characters the very body and pressure of actual life, no writer, living or dead, has surpassed her.
John Cowper Powys