Northanger Abbey

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Northanger Abbey

By: Jane Austen

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

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Jane Austen's first major novel, a parody of the popular literature of the time, is an ironic tale of the romantic folly of men and women in pursuit of love, marriage, and money. The humorous adventures of young Catherine as she encounters "the difficulties and dangers of a six weeks' residence in Bath" lead to some of Austen's most brilliant social satire. There is Catherine's hilarious liaison with a paragon of bad manners and boastfulness, her disastrous friendship with an unforgettably crass coquette, and a whirl of cotillion dances with their timeless mortifications. A visit to ancient Northanger Abbey, the ancestral home of the novel's handsome hero, excites the irrepressible Catherine's hopes of romance amid gothic horrors. But what awaits her there is a drama of a different kind. This novel is the most youthfully exuberant and broadly comic of Jane Austen's works.

(P)1995 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Jane AustenWanda McCaddonBlackstone Publishing

Classics

Genre Fiction

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Literature & Fiction

Satire

Funny

Witty

Classics Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Satire Funny Witty

Critic reviews

“About an imaginative young woman who reads too many Gothic novels, the story is Austen’s most lighthearted.”

(Boston Globe)

“Northanger Abbey, her most youthful and in many ways her most brillant novel…at times dares us to pay close attention to the artistic positions and processes her other novels tend to relegate to the background.”

(Claudia L. Johnson, Murray Professor of English Literature at Princeton University)

“[Austen] uses her rapier wit to mock not only the essential silliness of ‘horrid’ novels, but to expose the even more horrid workings of polite society…In many respects Northanger Abbey is the most lighthearted of Jane Austen’s novels, yet at its core is a serious, unsentimental commentary on love and marriage, nineteenth-century British style.”

(Amazon.com, editorial review)

“Combines a satire on conventional novels of polite society with one on gothic tales of terror.”

(Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature)

Most relevant

Force fed Northanger Abbey for O-level at a time when I was wholly unable to appreciate its genius and resentful of having to reproduce explanations and rationales to suit examiners questions, I have waited far too long to revisit this book. The narration is exquisite, perfectly drawing out the irony of Austen’s writing. At 15 I viewed Catherine Moreland as a silly empty headed girl, whose fortunes I had no interest in and having no knowledge of the history of the novel approached the task of assimilating it as a boring necessity. Now I am blown away but Austen’s skill, her lightness of touch and economy of words. An absolute joy.