Northanger Abbey

A good synopsis as any of my least fave Jane Austen novel: "Catherine Morland, the heroine of Northanger Abbey, is the crude prototype of the Austen heroine, a teenage provincial whose worldview, such as it is, has been shaped by her extensive reading of gothic novels. Just 17 years old when she embarks on her first trip beyond the family manor to the great resort of Bath, Catherine is good-natured but gullible. She befriends the duplicitous and supercilious Isabella Thorpe and gradually falls for the wellborn, well-read cleric Henry Tilney. Though she is not always quick nor erudite enough to understand Tilney, her attraction to him suggests, despite much evidence to the contrary, that she is capable of good judgment. The narrator, who keeps popping up to wink at us, seems determined to exploit Catherine’s lack of experience and infatuation with Romantic fiction for comic effect. When she is invited to the Tilney family seat by Henry’s sister Eleanor, she insists on infusing the environs of Northanger Abbey with gothic menace, and while she seems to be cured of this tendency after a few weeks at the Abbey, the best we can say of young Catherine is that she may someday grow up to be the kind of heroine who populates the later novels." - Jay McInerney