Analysis Of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

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Everyone has to enter into a new and unknown environment at some point in his or her life, but how would one expect a young, naïve girl, who has always lived a plain life with a poor family, to enter into a new, elegant, and cultured society? This is the situation that Jane Austen depicts for readers in Northanger Abbey and manages to present with appropriate satire and amusing humor. The young lady that Austen writes about is Catherine Morland; though she is well into her youth and almost a young adult, she is still immature and ignorant. Jane Austen successfully portrays and develops Catherine Morland toward maturity, heroism, and self-knowledge through having her leave her family for the first time, adapt to the sophisticated society of Bath, learn what life is really like outside the fictional novels she reads, and forge relationships with new people. “It,[Northanger Abbey], is the herald of Jane Austen's development of the theme of the heroine's transition from girlhood to womanhood” (Cummins). Catherine accepts an invitation to go on a trip to the resort town of Bath with the Allens, thus having to leave her family for the first time and face the trials of being independent.
Austen reveals how difficult traveling on her own for the first time is for Catherine and her
“Catherine Morland…is the innocent abroad who gains worldly wisdom: first in the fashionable society of Bath and then Northanger Abbey itself, where she learns not to interpret the world through her reading of gothic thrillers” (Merriam-Webster, Inc 817). She becomes a heroine by the end of the novel and readers can see a clear distinction from who she was when the book started to who she is when the book

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