Northanger Abbey

$450.00
By Moons Rare Books

6b Jane Austen. Illustrated by C. E. Brock. London: J. M. Dent, 1907. 

Notes 

Northanger Abbey serves as Jane Austen’s foundational coming-of-age novel and a brilliant, layered satire of the late 18th-century Gothic literary craze. The plot centers on Catherine Morland, a sheltered, imaginative 17-year-old country clergyman's daughter who enters the fashionable, competitive social world of Bath. An avid reader of melodramatic Gothic romances—specifically Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho—Catherine begins to comically mistake real-life events for dark, sinister conspiracies. Upon being invited to Northanger Abbey, the ancestral estate of her love interest, Henry Tilney, her overactive imagination reaches a fever pitch as she imagines murder and hidden secrets behind every locked door. Ultimately, Catherine suffers a series of painful social mortifications that force her to shed her literary delusions. Through this journey, Austen deftly transitions her protagonist from a naive girl "in training for a heroine" into a mature young woman capable of distinguishing fictional melodrama from actual human deception.

Though published posthumously in December 1817 (with the title page carrying the date 1818), Northanger Abbey holds a unique place in the Austen canon as her first completed full-length manuscript. Originally drafted between 1798 and 1799 under the working title Susan, Austen sold the manuscript to London publisher Benjamin Crosby in 1803 for £10. However, Crosby left the book unpublished in his vaults, forcing Austen’s brother, Henry, to buy back the copyright a year before the author's death. Austen's prose throughout the work is uniquely energetic and joyful, showcasing an early mastery of free indirect discourse, sharp irony, and cutting social observation. Alongside the core romance, the novel contains a famous, passionate authorial defense of fiction. Austen explicitly rejects the era's cultural snobbery toward novels, proudly declaring the medium to be a work in which the "greatest powers of the mind" are thoroughly 
Description
Light sage green binding with elaborate gilt designs to the cover and spine. Gilt lettering to cover and spine. Gilt top edge. Corners bumped. Some scuffing to lower board. Illustrated. Very good condition. 
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