Catherine Morland, the novel's protagonist, is invited to spend a few days at the former Northanger Abbey, the home of the family of the young Anglican pastor to whom she is engaged and who believes her to be a wealthy heiress. Impressed by the place and even more so by intense readings of horror novels then in vogue, the young woman lives by altering mundane everyday events in the light of imagined atmospheres of terror. A series of misunderstandings, the result of her overexcited imagination, endangers her newly formed romantic relationship, which is also undermined by the discovery of her real economic condition. A celebration of the social initiation rituals of the provincial English bourgeoisie at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this work by Austen does not end with the story of a thwarted passion, but represents a subtle parody of the sentimental novel, and especially of the Gothic novel, which remains highly relevant even today.
