ISBN: 9788170262350    Publisher: HERITAGE PUBLISHERS Year of publishing: 2009     Format:  Paperback No of Pages: 253        Language: English

Northanger Abbey is the story of a young girl Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered rural home to enter the busy sophisticated world of bath in the late 1790s. Northanger Abbey the first of Jane Austen's mature works to be completed was published posthumously in 1818 with her last novel. Persuasion in a four volume package. The compositional history of Northanger Abbey however remains unclear even till today. In Nothanger Abbey Jane has cleverly marged two kinds of novels into one. Catherine's adventures at bath that occupy the first part of the novel belong to the genre that describes a young lady's entrance into the world whereas the later chapter set in Northanger Abbey are a skit on the popular Gothic novels of the day. This is a novel that an intelligent reader would not read only for the sake of story but also for the sake of knowing more about the English society of the times of Jane Austen.
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Jane Austen (16 December 1775 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose realism biting social commentary and masterful use of free indirect speech burlesque and irony have earned her a place as one of the most widely read and most beloved writers in English literature. Austen lived her entire life as part of a small and close-knit family located on the lower fringes of English gentry.She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to Austen's development as a professional writer. Austen's artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-five years old. During this period she experimented with various literary forms including the epistolary novel which she tried and then abandoned and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth.From 1811 until 1816 with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811) Pride and Prejudice (1813) Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816) she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion both published posthumously in 1818 and began a third which was eventually titled Sanditon but died before completing it. Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the eighteenth century and are part of the transition to nineteenth-century realism.Austen's plots though fundamentally comic highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security.Like those of Samuel Johnson one of the strongest influences on her writing her works are concerned with moral issues. During Austen's lifetime because she chose to publish anonymously her works brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews. Through the mid-nineteenth century her novels were admired only by members of the literary elite. However the publication of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced her to a wider public as an appealing personality and kindled popular interest in her works. By the 1940s Austen was widely accepted in academia as a 'great English writer'. The second half of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship which explored many aspects of her novels: artistic ideological and historical. In popular culture a Janeite fan culture has developed centred on Austen's life her works and the various film and television adaptations of them.
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