ABSTRACT
In this essay, Susan Celia Greenfield explores queer Austen as a well-recognised area of Austen studies and offers a queer reading of Austen’s first major novel, Northanger Abbey . The essay addresses the heroine’s and hero’s resistance to gender norms as well as the heroine’s reading of Ann Radcliffe’s contemporarily famous gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho. Though both these features of Northanger Abbey have received substantial attention, this essay investigates their joint relation to the queerness of the heroine’s gothic obsessions. These obsessions are particularly evident in her desire to re-enact one of Udolpho’s most formulaic—and arguably most homoerotically charged—scenes.
