Northanger Abbey — Jane Austen

Jane Austen's earliest major novel, NORTHANGER ABBEY, is a work of wonderful ironic humor, a parody of the popular literature of the time, and an intriguing tale of men and women in pursuit of love, marriage, and money.

The romantic folly of young Catherine Morland, who encounters "the difficulties and dangers of a six weeks' residence in Bath," leads to some of Jane Austen's most brilliant social satire: Catherine's hilarious liaison with a paragon of bad manners and boastfulness; her disastrous friendship with an unforgettably crass coquette, Isabella Thorpe; and a whirl of cotillion dances complete with such timeless mortifications as a girl not asked to dance -- or worse, asked to dance by the wrong partner The delightful climax, a visit to ancient Northanger Abbey, the ancestral home of the novel's handsome hero, excites the irrepressible Catherine's hopes of romance amid Gothic horrors, but what awaits her there is a drama of a different kind, in this most youthfully exuberant and broadly comic of Jane Austen's works.