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Dec 16, 2009

Claire rated it:

I have a confession to make.

Secretly, I much prefer "Northanger Abbey" and "Mansfield Park" to anything else written by Jane Austen, even "Pride and Prejudice," which we're all supposed to claim as our favorite because it is one of the Greatest Books Ever Written In the English Language. I don't DISLIKE "Pride and Prejudice," but I just don't think it stands up to this one. I'm sorry, but it's true.

"Northanger Abbey" fee More...

10 comments like (66 people liked it)

Oct 26, 2011

Ceridwen rated it:

There are many things wrong with the film adaption of Pride and Prejudice which stars Kira Knightly, the most obvious of which is tone. Though Austen is often mistaken for a high Romantic, thrown in with the Brontës with their wild passions and Gothic styles, rainstorms and moors are not Austen's purview. Her plots and characters are based on social realism or caricature; her sensibility is of the satirist. Darcy does not stride out over the morning grass with his coat unbuttoned, and Elizabeth More...

32 comments like (39 people liked it)

Dec 19, 2008

Jason rated it:

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label.

Book #24: Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen (1818)

The story in a nutshell:
Although not published until after More...

3 comments like (48 people liked it)

Jul 10, 2007

Boz4pm rated it:

It was with some trepidation that I started this. I feared the worst, but also hoped that time, age and the changes in me might mean I could better appreciate what it was about this author that appeals to so many.

As it turned out it was a pleasant surprise.

The foreword says this book is perhaps not the most polished of all of Austen’s works. It was one of the earliest she wrote, yet was published after she had died. She did not go back to edit it the same way that she di More...

1 comment like (8 people liked it)

Mar 16, 2009

Trevor rated it:

Having read both Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion I was a little surprised by this one. The first thing that surprised me was that the heroine is basically as thick as they come. I would have said that Austen is the sort of writer who creates the sort of main female characters that men are rather likely to fall in love with. I mean, I know women who go all weak at the knees over Mr Darcy, but when compared to Lizzy he is merely a sad shadow.

All the same, Catherine is hardly what More...

3 comments like (17 people liked it)

Apr 04, 2011

Kwesi 章英狮 rated it:

This is my second Austen book and I really enjoyed it. Yes, I enjoyed it but there are parts that bore me to death, like trying to force me down to bed. I enjoyed how Austen wrote every conversation the characters trying to deliver, they are graceful, with intent and very unique. I'm not used the way they speak and maybe if somebody heard me talking like Catherine maybe people will laugh at me or get annoyed easily. But one thing that really attract me most was Austen's Catherine, she's not girl More...

38 comments like (12 people liked it)

Jan 05, 2008

Skylar rated it:

When I first read Northanger Abbey as a teenager, I thought it little more than a clever, entertaining parody on the gothic romance genre, and a rather captivating romance story itself. Upon my second reading, however, I now see it only secondarily as a parody, and primarily as a satire on the duplicitous nature of civilized man, including (but not limited to) an exposé of the games courting men and women play. Northanger Abbey is very well written, and though it lacks the subtlety of Austen’s l More...

0 comments like (12 people liked it)

Jan 12, 2012

Luann rated it:

I really wanted to like this! In the beginning, I thought it would be a 5-star book for me. I thought it might turn out to be my top favorite Jane Austen. But somehow it just didn't turn into the book I thought it was going to be.

Things I liked:
* I enjoyed all the talk of novels and reading - and would have liked even more of that.
* The conversations between Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland were my favorite parts of the book. I might go back and reread just those parts More...

7 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 02, 2011

Nicola rated it:

This review can also be found here on my blog.

Well, this book is slightly unpolished and probably would have benefited from a couple more rewrites (particularly the narration at the ending) but in terms of characters, plot and wit? It was absolutely perfect!

I really enjoyed the narrator for the most part. I liked the little snippets of opinion she put in every so often- it's so unusual for the reader to actually be addressed by the narrator- and I thought it worked well More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Jul 08, 2008

Martine rated it:

Penguin calls Northanger Abbey 'the most youthful and optimistic' of Jane Austen’s romances. I'm going to be slightly less generous myself and call it the most immature of her major works. While the story about a seventeen-year-old girl who is led astray by false friends and her own overactive imagination is delightful, the way in which it is told is in some regards quite immature. So is the heroine herself, who sadly doesn't really work for me. As far as I'm concerned, sweet and naïve Catherine More...

3 comments like (12 people liked it)

May 24, 2007

Kelly rated it:

This is one of the lesser regarded Austens. It has nowhere near the fan club that the Holy Trinity of Austen (Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility) has. It's one of her first books (if not the first), and it's true, the prose and development of characters is much less mature. The book is more of a homage (in a sense, she more satires it) to the gothic era, mixed into the comedy of manners style that she would be famous for later.

But I LOVE this book. Seriously, this bo More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Aug 07, 2011

Kathryn rated it:

Although Catherine Morland is not exactly Austen's most sparkling female protagonist, Henry Tilney, the hero of this novel, is witty enough for both of them. He's not often present, however, so the real entertainment value of the book resides in its clever parody of Gothic novels. Previous readings of this book left me a little dry but I must have been paying closer attention to the plot points and characterizations rather than the overall satirizing purpose of the book which Austen clearly de More...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Oct 30, 2011

Kim rated it:

I'd forgotten just how funny Northanger Abbey really is. Listening to it on audiobook this time around gave me plenty of opportunities to laugh out loud and the reading by Juliet Stevenson was truly superb. It is a shame that Austen didn't get to revise Northanger Abbey before her death as she had intended to. It is without doubt a weaker novel than her masterpieces: the ending is rushed and the two distinct threads of the novel don't meld together that convincingly. However, it is splendidly fu More...

6 comments like (4 people liked it)

Oct 26, 2011

Misty rated it:

Austen-ites tend to look down on this one as the lesser of the six, but this is one of my favorites because it is so fun and light. It's breezy, and this may sound weird, but I think it most shows what Jane would have been like as a friend.

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Sep 03, 2010

Joel rated it:

This is the first Jane Austen I've read. I picked it because it's short, it was available in email installments from dailylit.com, and I'd read a review here on goodreads that suggested it was basically a 19th-century cross between chick lit and Mean Girls.

I actually... really liked it. It's only very slightly boring, which is a huge compliment, considering I've often found reading anything written before, oh, 1900 to be an awful chore. And it's actually surprisingly funny. Not anyth More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jan 09, 2010

Michael rated it:

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1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Mar 27, 2008

Summer rated it:

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0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 02, 2008

Holly rated it:

I'm not even done and I'm already in love with this book. I can't believe Jane wrote this so young. I was quite surprised to find so much truth still to be found in a comparison of personality types between her age and ours. While we do not share the strict social guidelines governing all interactions, we still have the same lessons to be learned in friendships and relationships as the heroine found herself schooled in. Witty, charming, her emotions and social situations leap off the page and en More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Feb 27, 2011

LeAnn rated it:

I really enjoyed Austen's Northanger Abbey, perhaps partly due to the fact that I'd mistakenly thought it must be less good than her other novels, all of which I've read. Certainly there aren't a-thousand-and-one sequels, prequels, adaptations, and movies of it, are there?

However, I think I understand. Northanger Abbey is less a romance than a satire of Gothic romance. It's witty authorial commentary on the progression of the story and the action of the characters made me laugh out l More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 01, 2009

Ayu rated it:

I so feel connected with Catherine since people often say I am over-imaginative, like the heroine in Northanger Abbey. I personally think the mystery element makes the novel more interesting. Northanger Abbey as the setting also gives some Gothic element to the novel. Not really into Gothic stuffs, but sometimes it is needed to add the thrill. However, I would say the plot is kinda flat. I could not find the rising action and how the conflict ends. I don’t even comprehend what the conflict reall More...

17 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 07, 2011

Simona rated it:

La persona, uomo o donna che sia, che non si diverte a leggere un buon romanzo, dev'essere intollerabilmente stupida.

Come hanno detto in molti, non sarà una Elizabeth Bennet, non sarà una Emma Woodhouse, ma ho amato fino in fondo la piccola, fantasiosa, ingenua Catherine Morland.
Ah, la Austen non si smentisce mai!

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 21, 2011

Liza rated it:

I really enjoyed this novel; of course, I did. It is a Jane Austen novel, after all. I have heard this novel called a "gothic" novel, but I actually think it is a great deal more than that. In many places it seems to be a parody of a gothic novel, a self-conscious, tongue-in-cheek take on the gothic novel genre. I would call this novel self-conscious because Austen's narrator, in many cases, seems to have a direct awareness of her audience, and she directly opens a dialogue with her re More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 20, 2010

Cheryl rated it:

This is the second book our Jane Austen Book Club decided to read. Our first was Emma. I enjoyed this one so much more than Emma! It was easier to read, the sentences made sense, and I only skimmed over maybe 3 pages. I sat down with the intention of only reading a chapter or two at about 4pm but couldn't put the book down until I finished it at about 10:30pm!!! I had to know how it ended and it just flowed so nicely that I continued to read it all the way through.

Catherine is More...

7 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 02, 2008

Jo rated it:

I was very disappointed in this book. I found the characters boring and cliche. I understand that Austen's brother had this book published after her death. I can understand why she never had it published.

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Aug 07, 2011

Amanda rated it:

“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine.” So goes the first line of Austen’s semi-satire of the old Gothic novel tradition. We follow Catherine as she goes off on her first “adventure” and manages to muddle a lot of her life by trying to relate too much to Udolpho and other Gothic novels. And of course, we also follow her as she falls in love.

Remember back in the spring, when I said I thought five chances were enough for J More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 17, 2011

Suna rated it:

I had Emma-Issues with this book: Catherine Morland was so phenomenally daft that it sometimes overwhelmed everything else in a wave of toe-curling exasperation.

So sorry, book. It's not you. It's me. I get too emotional about characters.

Which means that, once again, Austen has utterly blown my mind with her writing: To craft fictional people that well, that wittily, that sharply, that relentlessly. Ai. My cringing heart.

Because at the heart of the matter l More...

10 comments like (3 people liked it)

Oct 20, 2010

Abigail rated it:

Although published posthumously, together with Persuasion, Northanger Abbey was actually the first novel that Jane Austen completed, and has always struck me as being the least mature of her major works. It is the story of young Catherine Morland, an impressionable seventeen-year-old girl with a taste for gothic romance novels, whose exciting trip to Bath with family friends introduces her to two very different sets of people - the Thorpes and the Tilneys. The gradual process whereby Catherine More...

8 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jan 23, 2008

KT rated it:

My least favorite Austen book, Northanger Abbey's greatest weakness isn't a lack of deftness by the author but Austen's success at rendering a flawed protagonist. Our "heroine" is Catherine Morland, a painfully naïve teenager making her first long trip away from home. She's a bit dim, our Catherine, and so eager for "attachment" that she is easily swayed by the character of her companions.
In the first half of the novel, Austen is rather brutal in conveying Catherine's More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Jan 19, 2008

Leanna rated it:

In preparation for the latest film adaptation of Northanger Abbey (Sunday on PBS), I reread the book.

I haven’t read Northanger Abbey for several years. With the passage of time, my mind had warped its content. In my memory, the book consists mainly of Catherine Morland’s fantastical daydreams, which are induced by an overdose of gothic novels. My most vivid memory is of Catherine as the Tilneys’ houseguest. Somehow, she deduces General Tilney murdered his wife.

Now that I’ More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 06, 2008

Alison rated it:

Northanger Abbey is less serious than most of Austen's novels, and more tongue-in-cheek. Austen takes on Gothic literature, novels, society, and human nature. She really knew people--their ridiculousness, their tendency to over-imagine circumstances, their misguided priorities and self-serving natures. But this is a light read...funny and good-natured.

Naive Catherine Moreland has an over-active imagination. While visiting Bath, she mingles with society for the first time. She fa More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

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