Northanger Abbey: Introduction by Claudia Johnson - Hardcover

Northanger Abbey is a perfectly aimed literary parody that is also a withering satire of the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century. But most of all, it is the story of the initiation into life of its naïve but sweetly appealing heroine, Catherine Morland, a willing victim of the contemporary craze for Gothic literature who is determined to see herself as the heroine of a dark and thrilling romance. When she is invited to Northanger Abbey, the grand though forbidding ancestral seat of her suitor, Henry Tilney, she finds herself embroiled in a real drama of misapprehension, mistreatment, and mortification, until common sense and humor-and a crucial clarification of Catherine's financial status-resolve her problems and win her the approval of Henry's formidable father.

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Six weeks of shopping, taking tea with the most fashionable ladies and dancing with the most handsome gentlemen is what awaits young Catherine Morland when she makes her entree into the leisure society at Bath. But, oh, the thrill of an unexpected invitation from the mysterious Tilney family to stay at their home-a veritable abbey.