The best-value edition, combining Northanger Abbey with three minor works, two early, one late, showing her originality across the full range of her career.
New introduction by Claudia L. Johnson reassesses received opinion about Northanger Abbey at the level of style as well as theme, and addresses recent critics as well as long established ones.
Integrates for the first time the shorter, less-discussed works into the argument.
Reset text has crisper appearance.
New, up-to-date bibliography, and new chronology by General Editor Vivien Jones (University of Leeds).
New and extensive notes in particular draw attention to the many subtle parodies of the Gothic genre.
Appendices on social rank and dancing further contextualize the works.
Northanger Abbey is about the misadventures of Catherine Morland, young, ingenuous, and mettlesome, and an indefatigable reader of gothic novels. Their romantic excess and dark overstatement feed her imagination, as tyrannical fathers and diabolical villains work their evil on forlorn heroines in isolated settings. What could be more remote from the uneventful securities of life in the midland counties of England? Yet as Austen brilliantly contrasts fiction with reality, ordinary life takes a more sinister turn, and edginess and circumspection are reaffirmed alongside comedy and literary burlesque.