The Gothic Novel and the Invention of the Middle-Class Reader: Northanger Abbey As Case Study

During this conversation with her friend Isabella Thorpe, Catherine Morland (the heroine of Jane Austen\u27s Northanger Abbey) reveals her intense infatuation with Gothic novels and alludes to their propensity for instilling blood-tingling, hair-raising horror in their readers. But despite Catherine\u27s evident enthusiasm for reading horrid novels and the thinly veiled affinities between the Gothic genre and Northanger Abbey, scholars believed for many years that the novels suggested by Isabella were merely contrivances of Austen\u27s vivid imagination. However, in November, 1901, almost one hundred years after Northanger Abbey was originally published, John Louis Haney of the University of Pennsylvania informed the editors of Modem Language Notes that while [i]t might be supposed that Miss Austen, in her evident satire of the Udolpho class of fiction, invented the above suggestive titles ... [a]s a matter of fact, they were all actual romances which appeared at London between 1793-1798 ( 446)..