Plot
Northanger Abbey is the story of a young woman, Catherine Morland, who is invited to Bath with family friends, the Allens, for the waters at Bath will help Mr. Allen's gout. Catherine (called "Cathy" by her many younger siblings) has been quite sheltered all her life, escaping only by reading Gothic novels, and so is delighted to go to Bath. Mrs. Allen introduces Catherine to the Thorpe family, including an older girl, Isabella, who befriends Catherine. The girls have bonded over their love of similar novels, when their brothers arrive. James (Catherine's brother) falls in love with Isabella, a hardened flirt. Likewise, John (Isabella's brother and James's friend) goes after Catherine, who does not like John half so much as John likes himself. Catherine is in love herself, however, with a quirky young minister, Henry Tilney, whom she met at a dance. Catherine befriends Henry's sister, Eleanor, and goes on many outing with the two siblings, after their brother, Frederick, comes to Bath. Isabella, having learned that James (to whom she is now engaged) is poor, begins to flirt with Frederick Tilney. Eleanor invites Catherine to stay with her at the Tilney's home, Northanger Abbey; Catherine accepts with pleasure, though she imagines that the Abbey will be rather like on the gloomy castles in her books. Catherine is, at first, welcomed by General Tilney (Henry's father), who has been bragged to by John Thorpe that Catherine (whom John thinks is in love with him) is an heiress. When he realizes that Catherine is not rich, however, he sends her packing. Back at home, Catherine is unhappy, missing Henry and disillusioned about her precious Gothic novels. Henry appears and proposes, however, and the story ends happily.
Read more about this topic: Northanger Abbey (1986 Film)
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
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