Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey has the strangest publication history of any Austen novel: written in 1798–99, the first of her novels sold to a publisher (in 1803, for £10), left unprinted in a drawer for thirteen years, bought back by its exasperated author, and finally published five months after her death. The freshest, funniest, most youthful of her books reached readers last — as a posthumous work.

Northanger Abbey at a glance

Author	Jane Austen
Written	1798–99 as Susan; revised 1803 and again c. 1816
Published	December 1817 (dated 1818), by John Murray, with Persuasion
Length	About 77,000 words; 31 chapters in two volumes
Reading time	Five to six hours
Setting	Bath and Gloucestershire, late 1790s
Genre	Comic novel; parody of the Gothic novel
Heroine	Catherine Morland, aged seventeen
Hero	Henry Tilney, a young clergyman
Read it	Free online, chapter by chapter

What is Northanger Abbey about?

Catherine Morland is the fourth of ten children of a country clergyman in Wiltshire: healthy, good-natured, fond of cricket and not at all remarkable. When wealthy neighbours, the Allens, take her to Bath for six weeks, she enters society for the first time. She meets two families who pull her in opposite directions. The Thorpes are loud, flattering and after money: Isabella becomes her instant best friend, and Isabella’s brother John decides, on very little evidence, that Catherine is an heiress. The Tilneys are quieter and cleverer. Henry teases her, his sister Eleanor befriends her, and their father, General Tilney, is unexpectedly eager to have her visit.

The second half moves to Northanger Abbey, the Tilney family home. Catherine has spent her Bath mornings reading Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, and she arrives hoping for secret passages, hidden manuscripts and perhaps a murdered wife. What she finds instead is modern plumbing, a laundry list and a humiliating misunderstanding. The real danger at Northanger is less romantic and more familiar: a father who values people by their fortunes.

That is as far as this page goes without spoilers. The full Northanger Abbey summary covers the plot volume by volume, including the ending.

The £10 hostage

Austen completed the novel — then called Susan — around 1799, and in 1803 the London firm Crosby & Co. bought it for £10 and even advertised it as forthcoming. Then nothing. In 1809 Austen wrote them a tart pseudonymous letter (signed “Mrs. Ashton Dennis,” so she could sign off “M.A.D.”) demanding publication or the return of the manuscript; Crosby offered it back for the £10 paid. Only in 1816, with four successful novels behind her, did her brother Henry buy it back — reportedly enjoying the moment of telling Crosby what they had been sitting on.

Austen then renamed her heroine’s book Catherine and added a short preface apologising that thirteen years had passed and that “places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes” since it was finished. She put it aside again, and it was her family who published it, under the title Northanger Abbey, in the same set as Persuasion after her death in July 1817. That is why you will sometimes see it described as a late novel. It is really one of the early three, drafted in the same few years as the first versions of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, and it reads like it: quick, knowing and more openly playful with the reader than anything she wrote later.

Main characters

Character	Who they are
Catherine Morland	The heroine: seventeen, honest, imaginative and badly misled by her reading
Henry Tilney	A witty young clergyman who teases Catherine and, eventually, sets her straight
Eleanor Tilney	Henry’s gentle, lonely sister and Catherine’s truest friend
General Tilney	Their father: charming in public, domineering at home, obsessed with money
Captain Frederick Tilney	The eldest Tilney son, a fashionable officer and flirt
Isabella Thorpe	Catherine’s first Bath friend, all gushing loyalty and calculation
John Thorpe	Isabella’s boastful brother, who lies about Catherine’s fortune
James Morland	Catherine’s brother, engaged to Isabella
Mr. and Mrs. Allen	Catherine’s chaperones in Bath; Mrs. Allen thinks mostly about muslin

Austen sets the two families against each other almost scene by scene. The Thorpes talk constantly and mean little; the Tilneys talk carefully and mean a great deal. Catherine’s education in the novel is largely a matter of learning to tell the difference.

Where and when it is set

The book falls into two halves: Bath, and the abbey.

Bath (Chapters 1–19). Austen knew Bath well. Her family moved there in 1801, and she had visited before that. The novel is full of real places: the Upper and Lower Rooms, where the balls were held; the Pump Room, where visitors drank the waters and checked who had arrived; Milsom Street, for shopping; Beechen Cliff, where Henry lectures Catherine on the picturesque. John Thorpe’s promised outing to Blaise Castle, a mock-Gothic folly near Bristol, is the first time Catherine’s hunger for the Gothic runs into a real building. For the city itself, see our guide to visiting Bath and the Jane Austen Festival.

Northanger Abbey (Chapters 20–31). The abbey is fictional, placed in Gloucestershire, and Austen makes a point of how thoroughly General Tilney has modernised it. Henry’s parsonage at Woodston, about twenty miles away, is where Catherine sees the life she might actually want. The story unfolds over a few months in the late 1790s, the same years in which it was written.

Is Northanger Abbey a Gothic novel?

Not quite. It is a novel about Gothic novels, and about the people who read them.

In the 1790s the Gothic was the most popular fiction in England. Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) was the blockbuster, and a whole industry of imitators followed. Austen takes the genre’s standard equipment — the isolated abbey, the stormy night, the locked chest, the forbidden room, the tyrannical father — and walks her heroine into each of them. Every time, the Gothic explanation turns out to be wrong.

In Chapter 6, Isabella reels off a reading list of “horrid” novels for Catherine to try next: Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine and Horrid Mysteries. For a long time readers assumed Austen had made them up. All seven are real books published in the 1790s. They were reprinted in the twentieth century as the “Northanger Horrid Novels.”

A parody with a warm heart

The joke is announced in the first sentence: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.” Catherine is an anti-heroine of the Gothic age — a plain, cheerful, cricket-playing girl whose head has been filled with Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho — and the novel runs her expectations into ordinary reality at every turn. The laundry list found in the mysterious cabinet is the genre’s most famous deflation.

But Austen’s parody is affectionate, and double-edged. Chapter 5 contains her celebrated “defence of the novel” — a sudden, first-person blaze against the fashionable habit of disparaging fiction: novels are works “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed.” She mocks Gothic excess while defending, fiercely, the form itself.

The real Gothic

The twist of the final volume is that Catherine’s instincts weren’t entirely wrong — just misfiled. General Tilney has committed no murder, but his mercenary rage on discovering Catherine isn’t rich, and his expulsion of a seventeen-year-old guest to make a seventy-mile journey alone, is genuine domestic cruelty. The Gothic, Austen suggests, doesn’t live in abbeys; it lives in ordinary selfishness with money at stake.

Themes

• Reading and imagination. The novel asks what fiction does to its readers. Catherine misreads Northanger because she reads too much Radcliffe; Henry reads widely and is not fooled. Austen’s conclusion is not that novels are dangerous but that readers need judgement as well as enthusiasm.
• Money and marriage. Almost every plot turn depends on someone’s guess about someone else’s income. John Thorpe inflates Catherine’s prospects, the General believes him, and Isabella drops James Morland the moment a richer prospect appears.
• Sincerity and flattery. Isabella’s friendship is all declaration; Eleanor’s is all action. Catherine’s growing up consists largely of learning which kind of person to trust.
• Growing up. Beneath the parody it is a coming-of-age story. Catherine begins the book unable to form an opinion of her own and ends it able to see through a general.

The key chapters

If you want to sample the novel before committing, these are the chapters readers remember:

Chapter	What happens
1	The mock-heroic opening: Catherine is “born to be an heroine” despite every sign to the contrary
5	Austen’s “defence of the novel”
6	Isabella’s list of horrid novels
14	The walk up Beechen Cliff: Henry on the picturesque, history and “a very nice book”
21	The stormy night and the mysterious cabinet
24	Henry’s rebuke: “Remember that we are English, that we are Christians”
28	Catherine is sent home without warning
31	The conclusion, and Austen’s playful last line on its moral

Northanger Abbey on screen

Only two screen adaptations have been made, both for British television:

• Northanger Abbey (1987), a BBC/A&E film with Katharine Schlesinger as Catherine, Peter Firth as Henry and Robert Hardy as General Tilney. It leans hard into the Gothic dream sequences and is the stranger of the two.
• Northanger Abbey (2007), ITV’s film written by Andrew Davies, with Felicity Jones as Catherine, JJ Feild as Henry and Carey Mulligan in an early role as Isabella Thorpe. It is lighter and closer to the novel’s comedy, and it is the one most people mean when they recommend “the Northanger Abbey adaptation.”

For how these compare with every other Austen adaptation, see our ranking of the best Jane Austen adaptations.

Where it fits among Austen’s novels

Northanger Abbey is the shortest of the six completed novels and the most openly comic. That makes it a good first Austen for readers who find Pride and Prejudice intimidating and a good fourth or fifth for readers who want to see where her irony began. See Jane Austen’s books in order for both the publication order and the order in which she wrote them.

Its standing

Long treated as the lightest of the six, Northanger Abbey has climbed in critical esteem as its self-awareness came to look ahead of its time — a novel about novel-reading, written by the form’s sharpest young critic. It remains the best entry point to Austen for readers who like their comedy fast.

The full text is free to read on this site, all 31 chapters, with the plot summary alongside if you want to check where you are.