new edition of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, originally published posthumously in 1818. Northanger Abbey is the story of seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, one of ten children of a country clergyman, whose wild imagination and excessive fondness for Gothic novels (especially Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho) has skewed her worldview and interactions with others to great comic effect. Fundamentally a parody of the Gothic fiction that was so popular in Austen's formative years, Northanger Abbey is a uniquely significant work, in that it shows Austen's departure from those conventions and tropes -- featuring three dimensional heroines, who were not perfect people, but flawed, rounded characters who behaved naturally and not just as the novel's plot demanded.
