Northanger Abbey

"Northanger Abbey" was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be completed for publication. Northanger Abbey is fundamentally a parody of Gothic fiction. Austen turns the conventions of eighteenth-century novels on their head, by making her heroine a plain and undistinguished girl from a middle-class family, allowing the heroine to fall in love with the hero before he has a serious thought of her, and exposing the heroine's romantic fears and curiosities as groundless.

Northanger Abbey follows seventeen year old Gothic novel aficionado Catherine Morland as she visits Bath, England.

Some have considered this novel to be Jane Austen's best work.