Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Catherine Morland loves scary novels, the kind with haunted castles and hidden secrets, and she reads far too many of them. Then she visits a real abbey, Northanger, as a guest of the Tilney family, and her imagination runs wild: surely something terrible must be hidden there. Jane Austen is teasing her, and teasing every reader who loves a mystery, but she does it with real affection.
Jane Austen finished this little novel in 1803 and sold it to a bookseller, who advertised it and then simply never printed it. She says so herself, with dry patience, in the advertisement at the front. The book only reached readers in 1817, after her death, which makes its freshness all the more remarkable. It is her funniest defense of novel reading itself.
Catherine Morland is seventeen, sweet, ordinary, and raised in the country with nine brothers and sisters. At Bath she makes a giddy friend, Isabella Thorpe, and meets the witty Henry Tilney and his sister, who invite her to stay at their home, Northanger Abbey. Catherine has been reading Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, so every old cabinet, locked room, and gloomy corridor at the abbey seems to promise a dreadful secret, and she invents one, at an embarrassing cost.
The joke lands kindly. Catherine is wrong about the abbey but not foolish about people for long, and Austen keeps reminding us that novels, including this one, are worth reading well. It is short, quick, and a perfect first Austen for a hesitant reader.
Jane Austen wrote Northanger Abbey in 1803, sold it to a bookseller who never printed it, and saw it published only in 1817, after her death. Catherine Morland, a clergyman's daughter of seventeen who has read too many Gothic novels, goes to Bath, falls in with the Tilney family, and visits their abbey expecting dungeons and secrets. What she learns there corrects her imagination, gently and comically.
This text opens with Austen's own Advertisement, in which she explains that the work was finished in 1803, sold to a bookseller, and even advertised, yet never published, for reasons she never learned. She asks readers to remember that thirteen years had passed when she wrote, and that places, manners, books, and opinions had changed in the meantime. The novel finally appeared in 1817, after her death.
Thirty one chapters follow. The first introduces Catherine Morland by everything she is not: not beautiful in childhood, not accomplished, not fond of gardens, a noise loving girl who preferred cricket to dolls and rolling down a green slope to cleanliness. At seventeen she goes to Bath, and the novel divides itself between the assembly rooms there and the visit to Northanger Abbey that gives the book its name.
Austen's target throughout is the Gothic fiction Catherine devours, above all Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, quoted and joked about by name. The parody is affectionate, and the defense of novels, delivered in the narrator's own voice, is one of the boldest passages Austen ever wrote.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 121.
The first chapter
This little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication. It was disposed of to a bookseller, it was even advertised, and why the business proceeded no farther, the author has never been able to learn. That any bookseller should think it worth-while to purchase what he did not think it worth-while to publish seems extraordinary. But with this, neither the author nor the public have any other concern than as some observation is necessary upon those parts of the work which thirteen years have made comparatively obsolete. The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1817 (written 1803). Author died 1817. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
Starvard