Recommendations
Books Like Northanger Abbey
Best books to read after Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Readers delighted by Austen's Gothic parody and Catherine Morland's education in reality will find the Gothic novels Austen was satirizing, the Austen novels that develop its comedy further, and the Victorian inheritors of its mode.
- 1Buy
The Mysteries of Udolpho
by Ann Radcliffe
The Gothic novel that Catherine Morland has been reading — Austen names Udolpho explicitly and expects her readers to know it; reading Udolpho before or after Northanger Abbey gives the parody its full satirical point and makes Catherine's Gothic-inflamed imagination completely comprehensible.
- 2Buy
Persuasion
by Jane Austen
Published in the same volume as Northanger Abbey (December 1817) — Austen's final completed novel and her most emotionally profound; the contrast between the comic apprentice piece and the elegiac masterpiece in one reading is the closest thing to a complete Austen experience in two volumes.
- 3Buy
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
The Austen novel that fully develops the comedy of manners mode that Northanger Abbey initiates — Elizabeth Bennet's education in distinguishing the truly gentlemanlike from the socially polished is the mature version of Catherine Morland's education; the essential next Austen after Northanger Abbey.
- 4Buy
Emma
by Jane Austen
The Austen novel most similar to Northanger Abbey in its concern with a heroine whose imagination distorts her perception of reality — where Catherine imagines Gothic terrors, Emma imagines romantic plots; both novels trace the education of an imaginative woman in the difference between her projections and actual human nature.
- 5Buy
The Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole
The founding Gothic text that Radcliffe developed and Austen ultimately parodies — reading Otranto shows the origin of the conventions Austen is deflating; the entire Gothic tradition from Walpole through Radcliffe to Northanger Abbey can be traced through these three texts.
- 6Buy
Sense and Sensibility
by Jane Austen
The Austen novel that most directly parallels Northanger Abbey's concern with excessive imagination and the education of feeling — Marianne Dashwood's Romantic sensibility is what Catherine Morland's Gothic imagination looks like from the outside; the two novels together show Austen's persistent concern with the relationship between feeling and judgment.
- 7Buy
The Female Quixote
by Charlotte Lennox
The eighteenth-century novel that is the direct predecessor to Northanger Abbey — Lennox's heroine Arabella has read too many French romances and mistakes the real world for their conventions, exactly as Catherine mistakes real English life for Radcliffe's Gothic conventions; reading The Female Quixote shows Austen's own literary ancestry.
- 8Buy
Mansfield Park
by Jane Austen
The Austen novel that most fully contrasts with Northanger Abbey in moral seriousness — where Catherine Morland's naivety is charming and educable, Fanny Price's moral scrupulousness is severe and tested; reading both shows the full range of Austen's thinking about innocence, education, and social corruption.
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