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    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey"
    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey"
    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey"
    Ebook45 pages35 minutes

    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMar 1, 2016
    ISBN9781535826402
    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey"

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      A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey" - Gale

      09

      Northanger Abbey

      Jane Austen

      1818

      Introduction

      Though it was published posthumously in 1818, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey was written in 1803 and it was the first novel she completed. The book is also one of the first of its day to employ realism (depicting the common, often uneventful happenings of everyday life). The work also comments on the novelistic conventions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including conventions related to the sentimental romance, as well as its subgenre, the Gothic romance. Austen both exploits and mocks these forms as she tells the story of young, naïve Catherine Morland, who eagerly enters the world of the country gentry and upper middle class society, only to be overwhelmed, confused, and sometimes disappointed by the people she meets and by the complexities of their social rules. Often picturing herself as the heroine in one of the romantic novels she reads, Catherine is forced repeatedly to test her notions of appropriate behavior. Her adventures take her from her home in Fullerton to the city of Bath, then to an estate in the country (Northanger Abbey), where her novel-influenced imagination runs wild. Inspired by the frightful mysteries that are the mainstay of Gothic romances, Catherine concocts in her imagination a crime where none actually exists. Northanger Abbey is a novel about novels, as well as a novel about contemporary society; and with a light, humorous touch, Austen demonstrates the limitations and the value of both. It is often commented that, while Austen parodies the sentimental novel, her writing is so skillful that she is also able to demonstrate how the sentimental novel can be written convincingly and movingly. The effect is such that readers who recognize the satirical elements in the work are nonetheless swept up in a warm and touching love story.

      Though it was published nearly 200 years ago, Northanger Abbey is available in a 2005 edition that is introduced and annotated by Alfred Mac Adam.

      Author Biography

      Austen was born on December 16, 1775, into a comfortably well-off family in the town of Steventon, in Hampshire, England. She was the seventh of the eight children of the Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen. The family was closely knit, and Austen's sister Cassandra was her best friend throughout her life. Like many middle class families of the time, the Austens were quite well read, and enjoyed writing and performing plays for each other. These plays were Austen's first forays into writing. Though these youthful works were not published in her lifetime, they were thematic and stylistic precursors to Austen's later works.

      While Austen's brothers received formal educations, she and her sister were educated largely at home. The girls studied for a brief period, from 1784

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