NORTHANGER ABBEY by Jane Austen

Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland joins a childless couple for a month in the town of Bath.  There she soon attracts two suitors—the delightful and handsome Henry Tilney and the loathsome and boring John Thorpe.  She tolerates Thorpe when she is desperate for a dance partner or eager for a visit to a castle she wants to tour, but her heart belongs to Tinley.  Thorpe turns out to be even more dastardly than we thought and puts Catherine, more than once, in a difficult spot.  Catherine has no experience of treachery the likes of which Thorpe is capable and thus is slow to comprehend that someone could be so intentionally deceitful.  I liked this book so much more than Mansfield Park, which took me on a long and arduous journey that at times challenged my attention span.  This novel, on the other hand, I read in two days and enjoyed every minute.  Granted, there may not be a lot of substance here, but no matter.  There are several particularly humorous sections, including one in which the author takes lighthearted potshots at readers and writers of fiction as being frivolous, even as we discover that Catherine and Tinley both love gothic novels.  This shared interest later leads Tinley to describe his family home to Catherine as a mysterious place with dark, scary passageways.  Catherine hangs on every word of his depiction, knowing it to be in jest, but then when she actually goes to Northanger Abbey, her imagination goes wild.  I can’t help wondering if Charlotte Brontë, stole part of the storyline for Jane Eyre from Jane Austen.