Northanger Abbey

About Northanger Abbey

Austen makes Catherine's reading habits both a source of pleasure and a cause of mistaken expectations. The narrator openly debates novels while the plot exposes more ordinary forms of manipulation and calculation. Social education comes through awkward conversation and disappointed assumptions, with wit directed at both imaginative excess and fashionable contempt for fiction.

Reading focus

Enjoy a playful encounter between Gothic expectations and social reality as an inexperienced reader learns to interpret people.

This reading edition contains 77,388 words in 32 original sections. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.

Author: Jane Austen. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.

Opening excerpt

This little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication. It was disposed of to a bookseller, it was even advertised, and why the business proceeded no farther, the author has never been able to learn. That any bookseller should think it worth-while to purchase what he did not think it worth-while to publish seems extraordinary. But with this, neither the author nor the public have any other concern than as some observation is necessary upon those parts of the work which thirteen years have made comparatively obsolete. The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during…

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