[ book tip by Ann Morgan ] The solidity of the regency world which Jane Austen constructs around us in many of her works can make it easy to forget that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literary world played host to a variety of styles and genres. Of these, perhaps the strangest and most intriguing was the Gothic, which gave rise to such nightmarish fantasy novels as Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. Heaping ghastly incident upon horrifying conjecture, the novels teeter on the verge of the ridiculous and it was to this that Jane Austen turned for inspiration when writing Northanger Abbey, the charming story of Catherine Morland, a Gothic heroine manqué.

An avid reader of Gothic fiction, Catherine is all too open to the possibility of horrid imaginings becoming a terrifying reality when she is invited to stay with the Tilney family at Northanger Abbey, their family seat. Having stuffed herself full of fanciful and dramatic assumptions about the place, Catherine ventures there, ready to encounter all manner of ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night. Yet Northanger Abbey is far from sinister and, try as she might, Catherine can discover no supernatural terrors there. Instead, as with all Austen, the real violence and savagery takes place in the drawing-room over card tables and cups of tea.

[ book info ] Austen, Jane: Northanger Abbey. (Book language: English) Penguin, 1996 (1818).