In which Catherine Morland lives too much in her novels, yet still comes to a happy end. This was my first Jane Austen and possibly my last, and not for lack of trying. Austen’s ‘Northanger Abbey’ ostensibly demonstrates—with humor—the pitfalls of allowing young minds to be shaped by excessive novel-reading, yet, for women at least, the world around them had not much to recommend it but duplicitous friends, grasping suitors, and household drudgery (although, granted, Catherine’s extended vacation at Bath and then the titular estate did not require much work on her part). Then entire first half of the book takes place at the health resort, where seventeen-year-old Catherine worries about how to make friends and whether her clothes and dancing skills are up to snuff. She finally decamps with her friend Eleanor Tilney to the Tilney home, Northanger Abbey, only to find it a disappointment in the gothic department. “In a house so furnished, and so guarded,” she thinks as a storm approaches, “she could have nothing to explore or suffer” (146-147). Confusion ensues from there, and not very prettily; Catherine makes a mortifying intimation to her would-be intended, and then she and her brother are disappointed in love and then not. The resolution feels tacked on, as if Austen herself had lost interest, which she all but says: readers, the narrator worries, “will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together toward perfect felicity” (233), a clever way to acknowledge the novelist’s imperative, but still… The best parts of the book are the comparisons made between real life and novels, and there just aren’t enough of those.