The primary story involves a naïve country girl, Catherine Morland, who journeys to the big city to come out into the world. Gothic motifs are only one aspect of the book, of course.
Several of Austen’s juvenilia played with gothic norms, making Northanger Abbey a bridge between her youthful writing efforts and her mature fiction. Gothic tales feature innocent heroines who, betrayed or abandoned by family and associates, meet with strange and terrifying happenings in the dark corners of gloomy castles or eerie old houses.
It is also a book closely tied to one of the important forms of the eighteenth century, the gothic novel. It was the first finished and the last to be revised the first sold for publication, the last (with Persuasion) to see print a novel of her youth that has many touches of an old master. Northanger Abbey is the most anomalous of Jane Austen’s novels.
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