Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl.Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction between Catherine and the various characters whom she meets there, and tracks her growing understanding of the world about her.
In this, her first full-length novel, Austen also fixes her sharp, ironic gaze on other kinds of contemporary novel, especially the Gothic school made famous by Ann Radcliffe. Catherine's reading becomes intertwined with her social and romantic adventures, adding to the uncertainties and embarrassments she must undergo before finding happiness.
Northanger Abbey is in some respects the Cinderella among Jane Austen"s novels. The first of her mature works to be completed, it often has had to share chapter-space with her juvenilia in book-length studies of Austen. In its own time, however, it did not appear in print until 1818, the year after its author"s death, when it appeared along with her last novel, Persuas/0n, each of them occupying two volumes of a fourvolume package.
Even by 1816, when Austen wrote her short "Advertisement by the Authoress" in anticipation of its publication, the novel had fallen prey to the passing of time and the accompanying changes to "places,manners, books and opinions". Of all her novels it is the one which is most closely and busily engaged with the language, styles and reading habits of the moment at which it is set, and yet at the time of its appearance the world was preoccupied with different fashions and different books. By 1818 Walter Scott had followed the literary sensation occasioned by his Waver/ey (i814) with a rapid succession of other novels set amid the colourful history and landscapes of Scodand,all eagerly seized on and dissected. In 1818 Mary Shelley published Frankenstein. The scene of young women in the fashions of a previous generation (the novel is also very engaged with the details of female dress) discussing the "horrid novels" of the 1790s as the latest thing must have seemed slightly passe towards the end of the second decade of the new century.
