- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: OUP Oxford; New edition edition (11 Sep 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0192840827
- ISBN-13: 978-0192840820
- Product Dimensions: 19 x 13 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 388,743 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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'...in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.' Northanger Abbey is about the misadventures of Catherine Morland, young, ingenuous, and mettlesome, and an indefatigable reader of gothic novels. Their romantic excess and dark overstatement feed her imagination, as tyrannical fathers and diabolical villains work their evil on forlorn heroines in isolated settings. What could be more remote from the uneventful securities of life in the midland counties of England? Yet as Austen brilliantly contrasts fiction with reality, ordinary life takes a more sinister turn, and edginess and circumspection are reaffirmed alongside comedy and literary burlesque. Also including Austen's other short fictions, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, this valuable new edition examines the ambitious and innovative works with which she inaugurated as well as closed her career.
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NO one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
NO one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is my favourite of Austen's novels but it's not as straightforward as it appears on first reading...its very demanding of the reader and too many people miss the intelligence behind it and see only the naive silliness of a herione who lives in the world of the Gothic Romance's she's reading rather than the real world.
I love the characterisation in this novel - General Tilney is cast by the heroine Catherine as the perfect Gothic villain, Isabella Thorpe is an arch maipulator and represents all that is vulgar and improper about Bath Society & Henry Tilney is an educator who helps the heroine grow and learn about the world around her without allowing her lose her innocence or spoiling her endearing straightforwardness.
Almost all of the plot is pretty much taken from Samuel Richardson's Camilla and other aspects of the story mirror the works of Ann radcliffe, Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth - the density of these literary allusions offers the knowing reader a kind of game or puzzle and invites the reader to spot the connections. This adds weight to the messages Austen is trying to get across about attitudes to reading and fiction in general & explains the full extent of the humour employed.
Austen is also able to make sharp observations about the materialist comodity culture in Bath that relies on 'objects' and displays of wealth to denote a person's worth in the early days of capitalism. Fashionableness itself is parodied and this sets up the eventual moral of the story when Catherine chooses a small community existance at a parsonage over overt display's of wealth and status that she might have had at Northanger Abbey. - Its this element of the novel that acts as a timely reminder of what we ought to value in life and makes the book remarkably current as well as perfect deptiction of 19th Century Bath.
In my opinion, Northanger Abbey should not be read in isolation but as part of a wider serious debate about fiction. Also - this novel is far more politically and socially aware than any of the other novels Austen wrote. A purely superficial reading of this book does not do it justice and I think this may be part of the reason why so many people dislike Northanger Abbey when they read it for the first time. Their expectations are high from the best loved of Austen's works (Pride and Prejudice or Emma for example). This is nothing like Austen's other works and should be taken on its on merits. I'd beg anyone who disliked this novel to give it another go! - Its fabulous!
I love the characterisation in this novel - General Tilney is cast by the heroine Catherine as the perfect Gothic villain, Isabella Thorpe is an arch maipulator and represents all that is vulgar and improper about Bath Society & Henry Tilney is an educator who helps the heroine grow and learn about the world around her without allowing her lose her innocence or spoiling her endearing straightforwardness.
Almost all of the plot is pretty much taken from Samuel Richardson's Camilla and other aspects of the story mirror the works of Ann radcliffe, Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth - the density of these literary allusions offers the knowing reader a kind of game or puzzle and invites the reader to spot the connections. This adds weight to the messages Austen is trying to get across about attitudes to reading and fiction in general & explains the full extent of the humour employed.
Austen is also able to make sharp observations about the materialist comodity culture in Bath that relies on 'objects' and displays of wealth to denote a person's worth in the early days of capitalism. Fashionableness itself is parodied and this sets up the eventual moral of the story when Catherine chooses a small community existance at a parsonage over overt display's of wealth and status that she might have had at Northanger Abbey. - Its this element of the novel that acts as a timely reminder of what we ought to value in life and makes the book remarkably current as well as perfect deptiction of 19th Century Bath.
In my opinion, Northanger Abbey should not be read in isolation but as part of a wider serious debate about fiction. Also - this novel is far more politically and socially aware than any of the other novels Austen wrote. A purely superficial reading of this book does not do it justice and I think this may be part of the reason why so many people dislike Northanger Abbey when they read it for the first time. Their expectations are high from the best loved of Austen's works (Pride and Prejudice or Emma for example). This is nothing like Austen's other works and should be taken on its on merits. I'd beg anyone who disliked this novel to give it another go! - Its fabulous!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Northanger Abbey feels quite slight in human terms in camparison with Austen's other novels. In lots of ways it's more a response to the fashion for gothic like Mrs Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford World's Classics) than it is a romance. But this is still a charming tale, perhaps more spiky and a little more derisive than the other more 'romantic' books. Still an excellent read but needs a little more contextualisation than the others.
Lady Susan is an experiment in the epistolary mode; and Sanditon an unfinished fragment. Not very satisfying for the general Austen fan but worth having if you're studying Austen.
Lady Susan is an experiment in the epistolary mode; and Sanditon an unfinished fragment. Not very satisfying for the general Austen fan but worth having if you're studying Austen.
Format:Paperback
Allhug says here that you read this delightful book as part of "a serious debate about fiction", which is baloney, of course. You read this book for the sheer pleasure afforded by the first part and mild alarm at the blundering way (never repeated thankfully) the second is rushed to a happy (but clumsy) conclusion, with a few nods to Gothic absurdity along the way. The really good elements are Isabella and John Thorpe, two of the author's most monstrously enjoyable creations; the view of Bath through the ingenuous and untested character of Catherine (brilliantly done, Isabella's behaviour has become transparent even to Catherine by the end); and you read it for the satisfaction of seeing Catherine getting her man by virtue of being such a good egg. The Bath scenes are brilliant, the Abbey ones less so, but the whole is superb. An author of promise; could go far.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
i recieved this book within a few days of purchase and it was in good condition. I would like to suggest that when the product is posted please use less packaging.
Published 16 months ago by taiba_123
A gothic tale
This is a darker Jane Austen and verges on the haunted house genre at times. Still fun and full of good characters but not the best of Jane Austens novels.
Published 22 months ago by Dottie33
Northanger Abbey
I love Jane Austen books and have read them all several times, and this would be my favourite if Pride and Prejudice wasn't so good! Read more
Published on 12 May 2009 by Lady Cordelia
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