ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf asserts that all women writers should lay flowers on the Westminster Abbey grave of Mrs. Aphra Behn, the first known professional woman writer, as "Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney". Northanger Abbey is one of the two most problematical of Jane Austen's texts, the other being Mansfield Park: Mansfield Park largely because its heroine seems dislikably priggish to many; and Northanger Abbey because its heroine is altogether too "lightweight." Isabella Thorpe, who introduces the Gothic to Catherine, is a kind of false mentor, a false confidante like Lucy Steele or Mary Crawford. Her teachings must be transcended by Catherine, the more-than-apt pupil. But Isabella and the Gothic are necessary steps in Catherine's adjustment to adult experience. Anne's consciousness is fully developed at the time the novel begins: "She had been forced into prudence in her youth; she learned romance as she grew older".
