Northanger Abbey

Reading time: about 5.5 h
Length: 77,471 words · 158 pages
Structure: 31 chapters · 1 front-matter section
Language: English
Era: Romantic

Catherine Morland, seventeen and addicted to Gothic novels, is taken to Bath, falls in with the Thorpes and the Tilneys, and is invited to the Tilney family seat — an abbey, where she expects, and half hopes for, secrets and horrors. Jane Austen wrote the book in the late 1790s; it was sold to a publisher in 1803, never issued, bought back, and finally published after her death in December 1817 with Persuasion.

A parody of the Gothic fashion that is also one of the warmest of Austen’s novels, and the one in which she speaks most directly in defence of novels themselves.

Austen’s own “Advertisement by the Authoress”, written when the book had already lain unpublished for thirteen years, stands at its head.

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About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

Part of The English Novel.

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About the author

Jane Austen

1775–1817 · Romantic

Jane Austen (1775–1817) was born at Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of a country clergyman, and spent her life in the south of England — Steventon, Bath, Southampton and finally Chawton, where she revised and wrote the six novels on which her reputation rests: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and, posthumously, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1817). All were published anonymously in her lifetime. She died at Winchester at forty-one.

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