Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen, 1817

Jane Austen’s comic novel of Catherine Morland, a young reader of Gothic romances, whose first stay in Bath and visit to the Tilney family’s home, Northanger Abbey, set her imagination to work.

Start reading32 chapters, about 78,000 words

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No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.
Chapter 1In context
- Writing
Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
Chapter 4In context
- Friendship
- Love
Only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
Chapter 5In context
- Reading
- Writing
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
Chapter 14In context
- Clever Jabs
- Reading
I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all⁠—it is very tiresome
Chapter 14In context
- History
- Women
Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid.
Chapter 14In context
- Intelligence
- Knowledge
From politics, it was an easy step to silence.
Chapter 14In context
- Comedy
- Politics
I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.
Chapter 16In context
- Comedy
- Talking

Famous quotes

Contents