Northanger Abbey (Annotated)

Northanger Abbey is Jane Austen's most playful and self-conscious novel, a brilliant fusion of coming-of-age narrative, social comedy, and literary parody. Through the imaginative Catherine Morland, Austen engages the conventions of the Gothic fiction then fashionable in late eighteenth-century Britain, especially its castles, secrets, and melodramatic terrors. Yet the novel is not merely a satire...