Northanger Abbey is a comedy about reading and misreading-of books and the world-and about different kinds of peril, both imagined and real. In it, Austen's youngest heroine, Catherine Morland, must navigate financial disadvantage, social constraint, and sometimes quite ruthless manipulation. The absurdities of fashion and conspicuous consumption, voguish ostentation and social competition are seen first in shark-infested Bath, (the premier health resort and marriage market of the day) and then in a more tranquil pocket of rural Gloucestershire that turns out to be a hotbed of materialism and greed. Jane Austen combines making fun of the excesses of the Gothic novel with larger moral issues: the folly of letting literature get in the way of life, and the inexcusability (especially for women) of not thinking for oneself.

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