Jane Austen depicts all her heroines as passionate readers of literature yet also has a tendency to highlight the lessons that can be learnt both right and wrong and how it effects her heroines lives, in this case Catherine’s life. Reading has the imperative purposes in Austen’s world of writing to offer her heroines an escape, entertainment, and information to guide through self-improvement and growth. Whereas the hero in Catherine’s ‘story’, Henry has a soberer, rational position giving him an obviously clearer outlook on many of the events in Jane Austen’s novel: Northanger Abbey, then Catherine’s desired literary fantasies.
Northanger Abbey is a Gothic romance, in
which a story of romance between Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney is narrated with an anti-gothic tone. Catherine, a young rather naïve girl at the age of seventeen, who has grown up reading many Gothic novels, imagines and inspires herself to be a Gothic style heroine. Northanger Abbey depicts Catherine Morland’s coming-of-age after she spends the season in Bath with Mr. and Mrs. Allen meeting and befriending the Thorpes (Isabella and John) and the Tilneys (Gerenal Tilney, Henry Tilney, Captain Fredrick Tilney, and Eleanor Tilney). Catherine Morland, begins as an over-imaginative reader of Gothic novels, such as Udolpho, who has consciously and unconsciously characterized the ‘mannered’ people of Fullerton, Bath, and Northanger Abbey as heroes, heroines, and villains, and realizes from the clearheaded and meticulous Henry Tilney to navigate the ‘true’ social and moral scenery of their reality. Catherine expects so much more from the world she inhabits and from the actions of those who she keeps company with, yet at every twist and turn Catherine is forced to be disappointed but her world of modernized comforts that does not live up to the climaxes in her literary predecessors by which she chooses to base her expectations.