Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen's humor and the realism of her characters and plots are irresistible to regular readers like us, while her biting social commentary has cemented her historical importance among scholars and critics. <i>Northanger Abbey</i> is fundamentally a parody of Gothic fiction. Austen turns the conventions of eighteenth-century novels on their head by making her heroine a plain and undistinguished girl from a middle-class family, allowing the heroine to fall in love with the hero before he has a serious thought of her, and exposing the heroine's romantic fears and curiosities as groundless. The novel also questions who can be trusted as a true companion and who might actually be a shallow, false friend. We may consider it to be the most funny and lighthearted of all her novels.