My 5th Austen book....lot's of fun!!

books:


	• Northanger Abbey (Modern Library Classics) Jane Austen Modern Library, 2002 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 89 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

My 5th Austen book....lot's of fun!!

This is perhaps the most childish (I mean that in a nice way) of Jane Austen's books. It's good for even teens my age to read and enjoy because it's shorter, with a more obvious side of humor to it than the other novels. (I have never minded reading classics; my friends think I'm weird but...I don't care!) Jane Austen seems to be laughing up her sleeve at her own story and its characters. It's a satire of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels and the stereotype heroes of the age and she often refers to Catherine as `a heroine' and compares her plights to those of other heroines. It's really very funny and some of the situations Kate finds herself in are highly entertaining.

Gone is the restraint and almost painfully polite atmosphere. This is really the only Austen book where you don't feel that suffocating blanket of manners and what's proper all around you. The heroine speaks pretty plainly, and the hero openly teases both her and his sister (and is very cute ^-^). The ending is pretty shocking and totally unexpected. My mom is almost psychic when it comes to guessing plots and their outcomes but even she didn't know what was coming when she read this book.

This is also the only Austen book (besides Pride and Prejudice) that got me to laugh out loud. It has a priceless section about how most heroines would never deign to touch a novel; if they picked one up by accident they would be sure to put it back down in disgust. However, Catherine is more than ready to read novels with her friend Isabella; books like The Mysteries of Udolpho, though she wouldn't like to admit it. When the hero-much to her dismay-finds out, he entirely approves. They have the cutest romance, and I really like the naïve Catherine as the heroine.

The only thing about the book I didn't like was the soppy friendship between Catherine and Isabella. When Catherine is slightly late meeting her friend, Isabella says this sickeningly sweet phrase to her, "Where have you been, darling? I have been waiting for you this past hour!" (Not an exact quotation, but something along those lines) I much prefer Henry's sister as her friend. There is actually a really god contrast between the beautiful Isabella and the quiet shy sister who turns out to be the better and more deserving friend. And Catherine is such an imaginative heroine, who reminds a bit of Anne of Green Gables with her flights of fancy that end hilariously!

I really liked this book and will probably read it again soon along with Emma and Pride and Prejudice. I'd like to see the movie also. Great book, and a great place to start reading Austen's novels. Highly recommended

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Jane Austen's Most Mature Writing

If you read this after Emma, you will see a slight but distinct maturing on the part of Austen. There is something more beautiful about the language, less playful perhaps, but more biting and more lively.

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Good book

If you become interesting in this book, please read it before seeing the movie. The movie is disapionting due to liberties taken. This book is darker than other Jane Austen classics, but still worth a look. Austen gives the romance that I always crave with a mysterious edge that is new, but understanding due to what was popular at the time. One of my favorites.

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Doing It Gothic Style

Doing It Gothic Style

NORTHANGER ABBEY
By: Jane Austen/Random House, Inc.

Catherine Morland was a young seventeen year old girl, growing up in a small village where she had about nine brothers and sisters, other than herself. Her mother was an ordinary woman who sometimes had too much to do, while her father was a clergyman. Just for the season, Catherine was invited by Mr. and Mrs. Allen to come with them to a town called Bath. At first, Mrs. Allen and Catherine are disappointed by the lack of acquaintances, even though they walk the town all day and go to the upper room and the lower rooms. Mrs. Allen had a sense for fashion and always had a beautiful dress on. Soon enough Catherine was introduced to Henry Tilney. However, as she started to develop a crush on him and looked forward to their meetings, he did not come around for a while. By a sudden twist of fate, she meets the Thorpe's. A family whom her brother knows because he had befriended their son and stayed with them for a summer .She quickly became friends with the eldest daughter, Isabella Thorpe. She had a grace and way about her that Catherine admired very much. She is the one who encourages Catherine's interest in romantic fantasies and gothic reading. Isabella also starts a love triangle between herself and James Morland, Catherine, John and Henry. For the first half it is nothing but parties and friendship. It is not until the second half of the book that Catherine is invited to the Tilney's house in Northanger Abbey, where she gets caught up in her own imagination and believes that in that house there has been a murder and the murderer still lives there. Just like in the gothic novels she had been reading. Unfortunately, she was kicked out by General Tilney himself later on.
In the end, the book was about a girl who was naïve, awkward and shy yet she had kindness in her heart and sometimes got lost in her own world sometimes seeing things that were not true. With all the books she read and believed in, her imagination would tend to catch up to her.
Overall, this book was a three star because even though the story was a little plane at the beginning, it improved later on. It was a good read if you are into a corky story or like the old books written in the late eighteen hundreds or beginning nineteen hundreds. I would not however, recommend it to anyone seeking adventure.
By: Christina Menendez

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Shrewd and witty

Jane Austen just knocks me out. She wrote in a living room full of extended family,she wrote longhand when paper was not so plentiful as it is today and mistakes could not be so frequently wadded up and tossed to the landfill, she wrote without the instant editing afforded by personal computers, she wrote without benefit of the MFA programs and workshops we are assured today are the only route to producing literary art, and yet she wrote beautifully and for all time. Every word counts, every character is real, every scene pulses along in a swift current. Her work can be many things at once: social satire, romance, social criticism, a comedy of manners. It is a portrait of a certain society in a certain time, it is a universal commentary on human foibles, gender relations, class and money.

NORTHANGER ABBEY was one of Austen's earliest mature works, and it stands alongside PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and the rest. She does something different in this one: she uses her own novel to, among other things, satirize the popular literature of her time, especially Ann Radcliffe's MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO. She sets out telling us that her protagonist, Catherine Morland, is not your typical heroine, that in fact she's ordinary without special talents, a dramatic home life or heart-stopping beauty. She belongs to the audience that was vacuuming up the burgeoning genre of popular literature of her time, and the second half of the story largely finds her attempting to live like a heroine in her favorite gothic romance, only to have reality jump out of the closet at her at every turn. The first half of the story is the set up for the second, the comedy of manners that positions her in the company of the residents of Northanger Abbey, whose name conjures up in her mind a dramatic ruin of a castle. There is, in fact, quite a bit of suspense that keeps you up late, just not the kind Catherine has in mind. If you pay attention in the first half of the book, you will find the "guns" neatly planted that go off in the last act.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

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