Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Northanger Abbey

By

star4 from 111 ratings
  • Genre Classics
  • Released
  • Size 355.32 kB

Description

The Author
There was nothing of the literary woman in the external affairs of her life and its conduct. Born on 16 December, 1775, at Steventon in Hampshire, of which her father was rector, and dying at Winchester on 18 July, 1817, she passed the intervening years almost entirely in the country. She lived with her family in Bath from 1801 to 1806, and at Southampton from 1806 to 1809. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817, at the age of 41, before completing it.

The Novel
Of the six published novels, Northanger Abbey is, probably, that which comes nearest to being Jane Austen’s earliest work. Northanger Abbey was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be completed for publication, though she had previously made a start on Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. According to Cassandra Austen's Memorandum, Susan (as it was first called) was written approximately during 1798–99. It was revised by Austen for the press in 1803, and sold in the same year for £10 to a London bookseller, Crosby & Co., who decided against publishing. In 1817, the bookseller was content to sell it back to the novelist's brother, Henry Austen, for the exact sum — £10 — that he had paid for it at the beginning, not knowing that the writer was by then the author of four popular novels. The novel was further revised before being brought out posthumously in late December 1817 (1818 given on the title-page), as the first two volumes of a four-volume set with Persuasion.

Northanger Abbey is fundamentally a parody of Gothic fiction. Austen turns the conventions of eighteenth-century novels on their head, by making her heroine a plain and undistinguished girl from a middle-class family, allowing the heroine to fall in love with the hero before he has a serious thought of her, and exposing the heroine's romantic fears and curiosities as groundless. Several Gothic novels are mentioned in the book, including most importantly The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian by Ann Radcliffe. Austen also satirizes Clermont, a Gothic novel by Regina Maria Roche. This last is included in a list of seven somewhat obscure Gothic works, known as the 'Northanger horrid novels'.

Literary Allusions

On Sir Walter Scott — Miss Austen's novels, especially Emma and Northanger Abbey, were great favourites with Scott, and he often read chapters of them to his evening circle.

Thomas Henry Lister, 1826 in „Granby“, Chapter 10:  ― "Now I hardly know whether you are joking or not. I think not―you look so serious. But do tell me your favourite novels. I hope you like nothing of Miss Edgeworth's or Miss Austen's. They are full of common-place people, that one recognises at once. You cannot think how I was disappointed in Northanger Abbey, and Castle Rackrent, for the titles did really promise something.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon in "Romance and Reality", Chapter 17, 1831: ― "I prefer Miss Austen's; they are the truest pictures of country life, whose little schemes, hopes, scandals, &c. are detected with a woman's tact, and told with a woman's vivacity."

More Jane Austen Books

  • Pride and Prejudice

    Pride and Prejudice

    Jane Austen

    Fiction & Literature

  • Emma

    Emma

    Jane Austen

    Romance

  • Persuasion

    Persuasion

    Jane Austen

    Fiction & Literature

  • Pride and Prejudice

    Pride and Prejudice

    Jane Austen & Mahalo.com

    Classics

  • Northanger Abbey

    Northanger Abbey

    Jane Austen

    Fiction & Literature

  • Sense and Sensibility

    Sense and Sensibility

    Jane Austen

    Romance

  • Pride and Prejudice

    Pride and Prejudice

    Jane Austen

    Romance

  • Love and friendship

    Love and friendship

    Jane Austen

    Fiction & Literature

  • Lady Susan

    Lady Susan

    Jane Austen

    Romance

  • Pride and Prejudice

    Pride and Prejudice

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • Mansfield Park

    Mansfield Park

    Jane Austen

    Literary Fiction

  • Sense and Sensibility

    Sense and Sensibility

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • Pride and Prejudice Audio Edition

    Pride and Prejudice Audio Edition

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • Sense and Sensibility (Deluxe Illustrated Edition)
  • 50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die vol: 1 [newly updated] (Book House Publishing)

    50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die vol: 1 [newly updated] (Book House Publishing)

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Aldous Huxley, Jane Austen, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, E. E. Cummings, Alexandre Dumas, Joseph Conrad, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Victor Hugo & E. M. Forster

    Fiction & Literature

  • Love and Friendship

    Love and Friendship

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • Emma

    Emma

    Jane Austen

    Romance

  • The Watsons

    The Watsons

    Jane Austen

    Fiction & Literature

  • Mansfield Park

    Mansfield Park

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • Persuasion

    Persuasion

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Jane Austen

    The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Jane Austen

    Jane Austen

    Fiction & Literature

  • Northanger Abbey

    Northanger Abbey

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • Emma

    Emma

    Jane Austen

    Romance

  • Pride and Prejudice

    Pride and Prejudice

    Jane Austen

    Historical Romance

  • Emma

    Emma

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • Lady Susan

    Lady Susan

    Jane Austen

    Fiction & Literature

  • 50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die vol: 2

    50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die vol: 2

    Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, G. K. Chesterton, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexandre Dumas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Jack London, H.P. Lovecraft, Lucy Maud Montgomery, EDGAR ALLAN POE, Marcel Proust, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, William Somerset Maugham, Herman Melville, George Sand, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, Leo Tolstoy & Bram Stoker

    Fiction & Literature

  • Lady Susan

    Lady Susan

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • Orgullo y Prejuicio

    Orgullo y Prejuicio

    Jane Austen

    Literary Criticism

  • Sense and Sensibility

    Sense and Sensibility

    Jane Austen

    Romance

  • Pride and Prejudice

    Pride and Prejudice

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes

    The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes

    Benjamin Franklin, John Woolman, William Penn, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Francis Bacon, John Milton, Thomas Browne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Burns, Saint Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Cicero, Pliny the Younger, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Plutarch, Virgil, Miguel de Cervantes, John Bunyan, Izaak Walton, Aesop, The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, John Dryden, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, George Gordon Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Christopher Marlowe, Dante Alighieri, Alessandro Manzoni, Homer, Richard Henry Dana, Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, Molière, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich von Schiller, Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Abraham Cowley, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, Sydney Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Babington Macaulay, William Makepeace Thackeray, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Alan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, Michael Faraday, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, Simon Newcomb, Archibald Geikie, Benvenuto Cellini, Michel de Montaigne, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Ernest Renan, Immanuel Kant, Giuseppe Mazzini, Herodotus, Tacitus, Francis Drake, Philip Nichols, Francis Pretty, Walter Bigges, Edward Haies, Walter Raleigh, René Descartes, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, William Henry Harrison, Niccolò Machiavelli, William Roper, Thomas More, Martin Luther, John Locke, George Berkeley, Hippocrates, Ambroise Pare, William Harvey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, John Webster, Philip Massinger, Blaise Pascal, Charles W. Eliot, William A. Neilson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Edward Everett Hale, Henry James, Victor Hugo, Honoré Balzac, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Alphonse Daudet, Gottfried Keller, Guy de Maupassant, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Juan Valera, Bjornstjerne Bjornson & Alexander L. Kielland

    Literary Criticism

  • Orgullo y prejuicio

    Orgullo y prejuicio

    Jane Austen

    Theater

  • Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

    Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

    Jane Austen & Seth Grahame-Smith

    Horror

  • 100 Greatest Books

    100 Greatest Books

    Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Shakespeare, Aldous Huxley, Victor Hugo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mark Twain, L.M. Montgomery, A. A. Milne, Alexandre Dumas, Leo Tolstoy, Kurt Vonnegut, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anna Sewell, Miguel de Cervantes, Herman Melville, L. Frank Baum, Jack London, Dante Alighieri, Joseph Conrad, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, H.G. Wells, Franz Kafka, The Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll, Louisa May Alcott, John Steinbeck, Emily Bronte, Oscar Wilde, Hermann Hesse & Niccolò Machiavelli

    Fiction & Literature

  • Persuasion: Audio Edition

    Persuasion: Audio Edition

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • Emma: Audio Edition

    Emma: Audio Edition

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • Love and Freindship [sic]

    Love and Freindship [sic]

    Jane Austen

    Romance for Young Adults

  • The Austen Collection

    The Austen Collection

    Jane Austen & James Edward Austen-Leigh

    Classics

  • Pride and Prejudice

    Pride and Prejudice

    Jane Austen & HappyReads.net

    Classics

  • Complete Works of Jane Austen. ILLUSTRATED.
  • Pride and Prejudice

    Pride and Prejudice

    Jane Austen

    Historical Romance

  • The Complete Harvard Classics - 71 Volumes

    The Complete Harvard Classics - 71 Volumes

    Charles W. Eliot, Benjamin Franklin, John Woolman, William Penn, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Francis Bacon, John Milton, Thomas Browne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Burns, Saint Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Cicero, Pliny the Younger, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Plutarch, Virgil, Miguel de Cervantes, John Bunyan, Izaak Walton, Aesop, The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, John Dryden, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, George Gordon Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Christopher Marlowe, Dante Alighieri, Alessandro Manzoni, Homer, Richard Henry Dana, Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, Molière, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich von Schiller, Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Abraham Cowley, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, Sydney Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Babington Macaulay, William Makepeace Thackeray, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Alan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, Michael Faraday, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, Simon Newcomb, Archibald Geikie, Benvenuto Cellini, Michel de Montaigne, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Ernest Renan, Immanuel Kant, Giuseppe Mazzini, Herodotus, Tacitus, Francis Drake, Philip Nichols, Francis Pretty, Walter Bigges, Edward Haies, Walter Raleigh, René Descartes, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, William Henry Harrison, Niccolò Machiavelli, William Roper, Thomas More, Martin Luther, John Locke, George Berkeley, Hippocrates, Ambroise Pare, William Harvey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, John Webster, Philip Massinger, Blaise Pascal, William A. Neilson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Edward Everett Hale, Henry James, Victor Hugo, Honoré Balzac, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Alphonse Daudet, Gottfried Keller, Guy de Maupassant, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Juan Valera, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson & Alexander L. Kielland

    Fiction & Literature

  • Sense and Sensibility

    Sense and Sensibility

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • Letters of Jane Austen

    Letters of Jane Austen

    Jane Austen

    Fiction & Literature

  • Pride and Prejudice

    Pride and Prejudice

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • Sense and Sensibility - Audio Edition
  • Sense and Sensibility

    Sense and Sensibility

    Jane Austen

    Classics

  • Pride and Prejudice: The Jane Austen Illustrated Edition
  • World Greatest Novels: 25 Favorite Classics

    World Greatest Novels: 25 Favorite Classics

    Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Jack London, Alexandre Dumas, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, William Somerset Maugham, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, Hermann Hesse, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce & Emily Brontë

    Classics