Northanger Abbey

Written during the same period as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, this novel represents Jane Austen's genius at its freshest and most enchanting. Its heroine is Catherine Morland, the mistakenly invited guest at an isolated, and quite mysterious, country manor. There the charming young husband-seeker falls in love with the young man of the house- and becomes willing prey to dark fancies bred in her by the fashionable Gothic horror novels of the day. Before Catherine's difficulties are resolved, the reader is permitted to witness the romantic chase in all its prescribed ritual, and its prime motivations: ambition, pleasure, greed, power, self-interest...love. With Northanger Abbey Jane Austen created a superb blending of social comedy and barbed literary satire, shaped by a vision merciless toward human folly, yet acutely sensitive to every form of cruelty. Her book stands as the product of an art at once delicate and strong, seemingly fragile but imperishable- an art which has made Jane Austen, as Elizabeth Hardwick declares, "...one of the glories of English literature." In the words of F.R. Leavis, "Jane Austen is one of the truly great writers, and herself a major fact in the background of other great writers."