Published posthumously in 1818, Northanger Abbey was one of Jane Austen’s earliest completed novels, and it shows a delicious satirical impulse at work. The heroine Catherine Morland, a thoroughly ordinary young woman, becomes so absorbed in Gothic novels that she begins to imagine dark mysteries lurking in the entirely respectable country house of Northanger Abbey — to comic and ultimately instructive effect.
Austen’s gentle mockery of the Gothic genre and of readers who take fiction too literally is paired with a warm and genuinely romantic plot. Download this free EPUB from Better Gutenberg and enjoy Austen at her most playful and knowing.