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 readers. For these reasons, the text is self-conscious; there is an awareness of the nature of the relationship between a text, it's narrator, and it's audience. Furthermore, this novel is not rightly a gothic novel because Austen's protagonist, her "heroine" Catherine, always deconstructs the gothic elements of her experience and ultimately feels the fool for allowing her imagination to get the best of her. She even credits her inclination towards suspicion to the literary works in which she was indulging (no doubt actual gothic novels). In any case, I really enjoyed Austen's wit and satiric narration in this work. It is not as polished of a jewel as some of her other more critically-acclaimed works, but it is, nonetheless, a diamond in the rough.