NORTHANGER ABBEY

NORTHANGER ABBEY is about a naïve young woman whose head is full of the Gothic novels she consumes, and who begins to imagine that life may well be even stranger than fiction. Catherine Morland makes a touching, if somewhat charmingly brainless, heroine; Henry Tilney is a self-possessed and witty hero; and the plot device in which Catherine sees General Tilney as a black-hearted villain out of a Gothic romance is ingenious and engrossing. In fact, this early work is full of sustained and sparkling inventiveness, and exhibits the sharp and accurate social observations of Austen''s more mature fiction.