#181 in Romance
Northanger Abbey
- 236
- Pages
- about 4.5 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“Northanger Abbey” is Austen at her most playful, a short comedy that teases Gothic novels and its own naive heroine with equal affection. Catherine Morland is deliberately ordinary, and the pleasure lies in the narrator’s good-humoured voice as the girl learns to tell fiction from life. Some readers are less happy with the pacing of the ending. A gentle place to begin with Austen, or to return to her.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Northanger Abbey, written by the English author Jane Austen, is a coming-of-age novel and a satire of Gothic novels. Although the title page is dated 1818 and the novel was published posthumously in 1817 with Persuasion, Northanger Abbey was completed in 1799. From a fondness of Gothic novels and an active imagination distorting her worldview, the story follows Catherine Morland, the naïve young protagonist, as she develops a better understanding of herself and the world around her.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.6 across 575 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 80% of the weight and the score stays at 7.6 — the Romance average of 7.6 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.7 | 47 | 8% |
| Hardcover | 7.6 | 528 | 92% |
Frequently asked
How long is Northanger Abbey?
It has 236 pages — shorter than 99% of the ranked books in Romance.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Romance — with scores between 7.3 and 8.0, closest to this book.
