A Year of Reading Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
presented by the Westport Library in partnership with the Jane Austen Society North America, CT Region.
A Year of Reading Jane Austen:
Discuss Northanger Abbey with Professor Barbara M. Benedict
Barbara M. Benedict is a professor of English at Trinity College and the author of Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1845-1900 and Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies. Two of her articles will appear in forthcoming books, and she is currently writing a book on Jane Austen. Also by Barbara Benedict: Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry.
A wonderfully entertaining coming-of-age story, Northanger Abbey is often referred to as Jane Austen’s “Gothic parody.” Decrepit castles, locked rooms, mysterious chests, cryptic notes, and tyrannical fathers give the story an uncanny air, but one with a decidedly satirical twist.
The story’s unlikely heroine is Catherine Morland, a remarkably innocent seventeen-year-old woman from a country parsonage. While spending a few weeks in Bath with a family friend, Catherine meets and falls in love with Henry Tilney, who invites her to visit his family estate, Northanger Abbey. Once there, Catherine, a great reader of Gothic thrillers, lets the shadowy atmosphere of the old mansion fill her mind with terrible suspicions. What is the mystery surrounding the death of Henry’s mother? Is the family concealing a terrible secret within the elegant rooms of the Abbey? Can she trust Henry, or is he part of an evil conspiracy? Catherine finds dreadful portents in the most prosaic events, until Henry persuades her to see the peril in confusing life with art.
Executed with high-spirited gusto, Northanger Abbey is the most lighthearted of Jane Austen’s novels, yet at its core this delightful novel is a serious, unsentimental commentary on love and marriage.
From GoodReads.com
There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Tuesday, Feb 23, 2016 7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Before the official kick-off to our year of reading Jane Austen, you can join PageTurners-- one of our Library Book Groups--for a discussion of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. It was the first of Austen's published novels and is the coming-of-age story of a young woman who is one of ten children of a country clergyman.
For copies of the book, phone 203.291.4821. New participants always welcome.
