Northanger Abbey

Catherine Morland leaves her quiet family home for Bath, where assemblies, new friendships and her growing attachment to Henry Tilney introduce her to fashionable society. An enthusiastic reader of Gothic novels, she interprets unfamiliar manners and family secrecy through the conventions of the books she admires.

Invited to Northanger Abbey, Catherine allows imagination to turn ordinary rooms and past bereavement into evidence of hidden crime. Her error becomes a lesson in judgement, but the novel also exposes the genuine cruelty of money, status and parental control beneath apparently rational social behaviour.