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The story's unlikely heroine is Catherine Morland, a remarkably innocent seventeen-year-old woman from a country parsonage. While spending a few weeks in Bath with a family friend, Catherine meets and falls in love with Henry Tilney, who invites her to visit his family estate, Northanger Abbey. Once there, Catherine, a great reader of Gothic thrillers, lets the shadowy atmosphere of the old mansion fill her mind with terrible suspicions. What is the mystery surrounding the death of Henry's mother? Is the family concealing a terrible secret within the elegant rooms of the Abbey? Can she trust Henry, or is he part of an evil conspiracy? Catherine finds dreadful portents in the most prosaic events, until Henry persuades her to see the peril in confusing life with art.
Executed with high-spirited gusto, Northanger Abbey is a lighthearted, yet unsentimental commentary on love and marriage.
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Northanger Abbey can be read as a subtle and witty criticism of the Gothic tradition in its early stages, and more particularly of works similar to Ann Radcliff's The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest. Like Emma, the novel is concerned with tracing the growth of a young woman's mind and the cultivation of her judgement. At the beginning of the story, Catherine is portrayed as an enthusiastic reader of horror tales. Accordingly, she makes her way through life with gothic expectations borrowed from her favorite romances. In the course of time, her interaction with the Tilneys and other people in Bath wakes he up of her dreamy frame of mind, and raises her awareness in regard to the difference between fiction and real life. At the same time, the novel addresses the economic side of matrimony, and investigates the role of wealth in bringing families together, or casting a life-time shadow of sadness over the lives of young people. Catherine, by way of illustration, was invited to the Abbey by General Tilney because the latter had mistaken her to be an heiress and, therefore, a suitable wife to his son. Once he had found out her prospects were not as bright as he thought them to be, however, he sent her back home hastily in a very disgraceful manner. The heroine's immature mindset at the beginning of the story calls attention to the inadequate upbringing of women at the time, and emphasizes the author's concern with women's education and lack of opportunities.