Austen’s Gothic Novel Crush Was Onto Something

A Girl, a Terrible Novel Habit, and a House That Isn’t Actually Haunted

Here’s the setup. Catherine Morland is seventeen, plain by Austen’s own admission (the opening chapter practically apologizes for her), and obsessed with gothic novels, the kind full of locked doors, dying candles, and villains in crumbling castles. She gets whisked off to Bath by family friends, where she falls in with the delightful, motor-mouthed Isabella Thorpe and her insufferable brother John, and meets Henry Tilney, a clergyman who talks in a way I can only describe as flirting via literary criticism.

Henry invites Catherine to his family’s estate, Northanger Abbey, and because her head is stuffed full of Ann Radcliffe novels, Catherine convinces herself the place is hiding a dark secret, maybe a murdered wife, maybe a locked wing nobody’s allowed into. It isn’t. That’s kind of the whole joke. Austen spends the back half of the book gently, lovingly demolishing the gothic genre by having her heroine act like she’s in one, and then making her (and us) sit with how embarrassing that is.

I won’t spoil what actually happens with General Tilney, Henry’s father, because the reveal of what he’s really hiding (nothing supernatural, something much more mundane and much more Austen) is one of the better gut-punches in her early work.

The Parts That Kill and the Parts That Drag

Look, I need to be honest about something first: this book takes a while to get going. The first third is Catherine bouncing between the Thorpes and the Tilneys at balls and pump rooms, and if you don’t already find Regency Bath social choreography inherently funny, you might find yourself checking how many pages are left. I did, on my first attempt, years before the bus-laughing read. I put it down at like page 60 and didn’t pick it back up for two years. So question your own taste here the way I had to question mine, because the book rewards patience in a way that isn’t obvious early on.

But once Henry Tilney shows up properly, this thing sings. Henry is, and I say this as someone who has read every Austen hero at this point, criminally underrated. He’s funny. He teases Catherine about muslin fabric with more charm than Darcy manages in an entire book of brooding. There’s a scene where he basically out-narrates Catherine’s own gothic fantasies back at her, mocking the genre she loves while somehow making her fall harder for him, and it’s some of the sharpest banter Austen ever wrote. It reads less like courtship and more like two people flirting through footnotes.

The genuine criticism: Catherine herself can be a frustrating protagonist. She’s meant to be naive, that’s the whole point, she’s a girl who’s read too many novels and not enough life, but there are stretches where her gullibility (falling for Isabella’s obvious manipulations, not once but repeatedly) tips from endearing into exasperating. Austen is in on the joke, I know that, this is satire of the sentimental heroine, not a failure of characterization. But knowing the joke doesn’t always make it less irritating to sit through in real time.

The tangent I have to include: this book basically invented the “unreliable narrator via genre-poisoned brain” trope that we now associate with things like Don Quixote (which did it earlier, fine, but for the marriage-plot novel specifically, Catherine Morland is the ancestor of every character who’s read too much fantasy and expects dragons). It’s wild that a book this self-aware about fiction was one of Austen’s first, written in her early twenties, and not published until after she died.

The ending, when Catherine finally gets what she wants, doesn’t hit with the same aching inevitability as Persuasion’s letter or the second proposal in Pride and Prejudice. It’s lighter than that. But it’s earned, and Henry’s declaration of feeling, once Austen finally lets him have one, lands because we’ve watched him actually pay attention to Catherine the whole time, not just admire her from a distance.

This is Austen’s book about what happens when you let fiction teach you how to read the world, and then the world refuses to cooperate.

About Jane Austen

Jane Austen wrote six novels, never married, lived most of her life in the English countryside with her sister Cassandra, and published anonymously as “By a Lady” because that’s just what a woman writing sharp social comedy had to do in 1811. Northanger Abbey was actually the first novel she completed and sold, back in 1803, but the publisher sat on it and never printed it, so it ended up being published after her death in 1817, alongside Persuasion, making it simultaneously her earliest finished work and one of her last released. She spent her career being underestimated by exactly the kind of people she was quietly making fun of, which feels appropriate for a woman whose books are still being dismissed as “just romance” by people who’ve clearly never read the sentence structure closely.

If the gothic parody bit worked on you, read these next

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, for the same wit with sharper romantic stakes
• The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, the actual gothic novel Catherine is obsessed with, so you can see exactly what’s being parodied
• Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, a much later book doing the same trick of a genre-obsessed young woman colliding with reality, this time aimed at rural melodrama

For your book club

1. Is Catherine Morland a satire of the reader, the writer, or both? Does Austen let herself off the hook?
2. Henry Tilney teases Catherine constantly. Where’s the line between flirtation and condescension, and does Austen let him cross it?
3. General Tilney’s real secret turns out to be about money and status, not murder. Why is that reveal more unsettling than a gothic villain would have been?
4. Isabella Thorpe is one of Austen’s most purely selfish characters. Did you feel sorry for her at all by the end?
5. This was Austen’s first finished novel but one of her last published. Does it feel like a first draft of her later concerns, or its own complete thing?