ABSTRACT
Northanger Abbey was arguably the first of Jane Austen's novels to be substantially completed in its present form. Its heroine Catherine Morland marks a distinct break with the earlier type of heroine she burlesqued in her juvenilia. Even though the undercutting in the first two chapters might seem at first glance to be directed against Catherine, a more careful reading shows its primary target to be the conventional sentimental heroine whose life proved so 'eventful' (15). In her new kind of fiction, Jane Austen subtly counterpoints former extravagances to imply how ineffectual these are in comprehending the more important vagaries of ordinary life. Despite Catherine's seemingly unpromising start and lack of prospects, her life does become eventful. Not only does she meet a lover in Henry Tilney, but an anticipation of something 'very shocking', 'horrible', and 'uncommonly dreadful' (112) is fulfilled in what happens to her (though not in the sense in which she originally understands these words). Mrs Allen, with whom she goes to Bath, is not the treacherous chaperon of eighteenth-century fiction who will be guilty of turning her 'out of doors' (20). Instead this is reserved for her future father-in-law General Tilney.
