'The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid.' For Catherine Morland, young and ingenuous, the only good novel is a Gothic novel, and the more 'horrid' it is, the better it fuels her imagination. So when Henry Tilney and his family take her from fashionable Bath on a visit to their ancestral home in Gloucestershire, she is all too ready to find Northanger Abbey redolent of dark deeds, some of them committed, she believes, not so very long ago. She is persuaded to look at things in another light, but it is not until she returns to her native village in rural Wiltshire that she learns that one at least of those whom she has met in Bath really is what he seems. Short but packed with incident, Northanger Abbey is full of Jane Austen's characteristic comedy. Watch out for her reference to baseball - thought to be the first ever printed.
If you have ever expected Jane Austen's novels to be difficult to read, the Line Clear Edition is the one for you. Here is Jane Austen's classic novel in Jane Austen's words, made approachable by clear type and a clear layout, modern spelling and modern typography. The innovative chapter titles and contents list, derived from the text, will guide the familiar reader back to favourite passages without revealing the plot to a new reader.
The cover image is taken from a Cassini Old Series map, using mapping first published by the Ordnance Survey between 1817 (the year of Jane Austen's death) and 1830, and is reproduced by kind permission of Cassini Publishing Ltd. The front cover is centred on Bath, then and now once more in Somerset, and the scene of many entertaining episodes in the novel
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