“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine”: so runs the inauspicious opening of Northanger Abbey, foregrounding in its first line its amusing concern to subvert the expectations of contemporary readers who delighted in sentimental and gothic romances. Northanger Abbey was in fact Jane Austen’s first completed novel, initially drafted in Steventon between 1798 and 1799 under the title Susan, then revised in the winter of 1802-3 after the family had moved to Bath. However the novel was the last to be published, appearing as the first volume of a three-volume set with Persuasion in December 1817. It was originally sold to the publisher Richard

This article in full comprises 2944 words but only the first 150 or so words are available to non-members.

All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership, please click here.

Published 12 February 2007

Citation: Schneider, Ana-Karina. "Northanger Abbey". The Literary Encyclopedia. 12 February 2007.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3214, accessed 20 November 2009.]