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  • Published: 5 February 2008
  • ISBN: 9780451530844
  • Imprint: Signet
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $12.99

Northanger Abbey

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)




Jane Austen's witty exploration of the perils of mistaking fiction for reality, now in a collectible Deluxe Edition celebrating the 250th anniversary of the author's birth

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition

Jane Austen's brilliant satire of the gothic novel.

“If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.”

The most sprightly and satirical of Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey was written when the author was herself in her early twenties, and takes for its heroine seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, a spirited young woman preoccupied with the pleasures of dressing, dancing, and reading sensational novels. 

When she visits Northanger Abbey, the ancestral home of handsome Henry Tilney, Catherine’s taste in books comes back to haunt her. The rambling house, full of locked doors, and the family’s mysterious history give rise to delightfully dreadful suspicions, and finally only Catherine’s sweet nature and good humor triumph over her susceptibility. 

A sly commentary on the power of literature as well as a cautionary tale about the perils of naïveté, Northanger Abbey is a fresh and funny tale of one young woman receiving, as Margaret Drabble reveals in her illuminating introduction, “intensive instruction in the ways of the world.”

With an Introduction by Margaret Drabble
and an Afterword by Stephanie Laurens

  • Published: 5 February 2008
  • ISBN: 9780451530844
  • Imprint: Signet
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $12.99

Other books in the series

A Dog's Heart
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
Botchan
Kusamakura
Love
Annals
Selected Poems
Military Dispatches

About the author

Jane Austen

Jane Austen, the daughter of a clergyman, was born in Hampshire in 1775, and later lived in Bath and the village of Chawton. As a child and teenager, she wrote brilliantly witty stories for her family's amusement, as well as a novella, Lady Susan. Her first published novel was Sense and Sensibility, which appeared in 1811 and was soon followed by Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. Austen died in 1817, and Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously in 1818.

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