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Northanger Abbey is a perfectly aimed literary parody that is also a withering satire on the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the nineteenth cetury. But most of all, it is the story of the initiation into life of its naive but sweetly appealing herooine, Catehrine Morland, a willing victim of Gothic literature who is determined against all the evidence, 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 and mortification, until common sense and humor -- and a clarification of Catherine's financial status -- resolve her problems and win her the approval of General Tilney, Henry's formidable father.
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