In 1798, when she was just twenty-three years old, Jane Austen began writing Susan, which was' later retitled Northanger Abbey. Though it was the first of the three fulllength novels that she drafted in the 1790s, it was the last to published. Sense and Sensibility was the first to see print, in 1811, with Pride and Prejudice following soon thereafter, in 1813. These three novels, with which Austenbegan her career, include all of the elements that would come to characterize her writing---romantic plot, social satire, and psychological insight.~While she refined these elements in her later novels, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, the early works represent her initial, and some argue most uninhibited, response to the culture in which she lived. Indeed, it may have been the very boldness of Austen's first novel that kept NorthangerAbbey from being published until after her death.

The earliest of her six major novels, Nerthanger Abbey remained unpublished until after Jane Austen"s death.A deliciously witty satire of popular Gothic romances, it is perhaps Austen"s lightest, most delightful excursion into a young woman"s world. Catherine Morland,an unlikely heroine--unlikely because she is so ordinary--forsakes her English village for the pleasures and perils of Bath. There, among a circle of Austen"s wonderfully vain, dissembling, and fashionable characters, she meets a potential suitor, Henry Tilney. But with her imagination fueled by melodramatic novels, Catherine turns a visit to his home, Northanger Abbey, into a hunt for dark family secrets. The result is a series of hilarious social gaffes and harsh awakenings that for all of Austen"s youthful exuberance nevertheless conveys her mature vision of literature and life--and the consequences of mistaking one for the other.