Reviews

Northanger Abbey is so unserious, and I love that.

Jane Austen’s protagonist here is seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland. And of course, because she is seventeen, she is at that magical age where she becomes the main character, the heroine, the main girl in every YA dystopian series–but in this case, Catherine would very much prefer to be the heroine of a gothic tale. She would love nothing more than to explore an old castle by candlelight, discover secret passageways, unearth forgotten artifacts of a mysterious nature, and perhaps even find herself in the middle of a long-unsolved crime.

When her neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Allen invite her to go to Bath with them, she embarks on her first adventure. Leaving home for the first time, she sees this as the beginning of her heroine’s journey. As an avid reader of gothic novels, Catherine Morland has developed a vivid imagination, which sometimes leads to disappointment when the real world fails to live up to her expectations.

I enjoyed reading Northanger Abbey, I even laughed out loud a few times. Catherine is a teenager and it shows!! She’s just a girl who wants to go on a gothic adventure. Honestly, I think she would have loved true crime podcasts and tv.

Anyway, here are some random thoughts I had while reading Northanger Abbey:

✨ I love how Catherine thinks and behaves in a straightforward way. She doesn’t understand why people would constantly say one thing but mean or do the opposite. But this also gets her in tricky situations because she is totally oblivious to the roundabout language and behaviors of courtship.

✨ Isabella Thorpe is that annoying friend who makes everything about her. She thinks she’s nice, but she’s really not. Her brother John Thorpe is a walking red flag disguised as a nice guy™. I also feel like he would be the type of iPhone user who will shit on you for using an Android.

✨ Okay so Catherine goes to Bath for the first time, and she is invited by new acquaintances/friends, the Tilneys, to come with them to Northanger Abbey. Mr and Mrs Allen, her chaperones, meet the Tilneys a few times and say sure, you can go with them, as long as your parents permit it. And she writes a letter home about it, and her parents say “Sure, you can go. I’m sure Mr and Mrs Allen can be trusted about the character of these people who we’ve never met. Spend a few weeks in the home of these strangers, it’s cool with us.” People with strict parents could never.

✨ The ending felt too abrupt??? After everything that happened, the ending is like “P.S. this is how the story ends. Bye!” Also, we don’t get to Northanger Abbey until volume two of the novel.