Northanger Abbey

📦 Product Details

• Authors: Jane Austen & Marilyn Butler
• Publisher: Penguin Black Classics
• Publication Date: 27 March 2003
• Language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• Print Length: 320 pages
• ISBN-10: 0141439793
• ISBN-13: 978-0141439792
• Item Weight: 300 g

📖 About the Book

Northanger Abbey is a witty and satirical novel by Jane Austen that combines romance, social commentary, and playful elements of Gothic fiction. The story follows Catherine Morland, a young woman whose vivid imagination is strongly influenced by the Gothic novels she enjoys reading.

When Catherine enters the social circles of Bath and later visits Northanger Abbey, her imagination causes her to interpret ordinary situations through the lens of Gothic mysteries. Through Catherine's experiences, Austen humorously explores reading, imagination, relationships, social manners, and expectations.

This Penguin Black Classics edition features editorial material by Marilyn Butler, offering readers additional literary context.

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naïve Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine's love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination influenced by novels of sensation and intrigue, Catherine imagines terrible crimes committed by General Tilney. With its broad comedy and irrepressible heroine, this is the most youthful and and optimistic of Jane Austen's works.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

✍️ About the Authors

Jane Austen (1775–1817) was a celebrated English novelist known for her wit, social observation, and exploration of relationships, class, marriage, and manners. Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, a small village in Hampshire, England. As a girl, she wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. She lived with her family in Steventon until her father, a clergyman in the Church of England, retired in 1801. After his death, in 1805, she, her mother, and her sister did not have a settled home until 1809, when they moved to Chawton, Hampshire. There she was extraordinarily productive, revising three novels and writing three more from scratch. Published during her lifetime were Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). Austen died on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, where she was receiving medical treatment, and was buried in that city’s cathedral. Two more novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1817 with a biographical notice by her brother Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. She also left two earlier compositions: a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives.

Marilyn Butler was a prominent British literary scholar and editor whose work focused extensively on English literature and literary history. Her contribution to this edition provides readers with useful context for understanding Austen's work.