Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (Annotated) With its irrepressible heroine and playful literary games, Northanger Abbey is Jane Austen's most youthful and optimistic novel. It is the story of Catherine Morland, an impressionable young woman whose first encounter with fashionable society introduces her to the thrills of Gothic romances and the sophisticated Tilneys, who invite her to their family home, Northanger Abbey. However, influenced by horror and suspense novels, Catherine begins to believe that terrible crimes are being committed, and her imagination threatens to escape.