Northanger Abbey
Catherine Morland
The heroine
A seventeen-year-old parson's daughter whose head is full of Gothic novels. She goes to Bath hoping for adventure and learns to tell romance from real life.
Catherine Morland grows up at Fullerton Parsonage as a lively, unglamorous girl who would rather play cricket with her brother James than practice her scales. By seventeen she has fallen for poetry and for thrilling Gothic novels, and she daydreams about haunted abbeys and mysterious corridors. She is sweet, earnest and good-hearted, and she is sometimes very naive.
Invited to Bath by the Allens, Catherine wants a true friend, a little excitement, and a chance to see the world. She takes people at their word, which makes her easy to fool, but she also has a stubborn honesty that never quite leaves her. Readers tend to love her because she is so sincere, even when her imagination runs far ahead of her good sense.
“A washing bill! It is nothing in the world but a washing bill! How could I be such a foolish girl?!”
In the story
Contains spoilers.
In Bath, Catherine meets the witty Henry Tilney, befriends his sister Eleanor, and is badly used by Isabella and John Thorpe. At Northanger Abbey she lets her imagination turn General Tilney into a murderer, and the truth is a laundry bill and a cheerful bedroom. Henry's gentle rebuke makes her see how far she has strayed.
Her real trial comes when the General sends her home alone at dawn. She keeps her dignity, learns to judge people by how they act, and in the end Henry rides to Fullerton to propose. They marry, and Catherine leaves the Gothic daydreams behind for a happy life at Woodston.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
