There are probably no readers of Bookhive who haven't read something by Jane Austen in their lives, but most people skip over Northanger Abbey in favor of the more popular novels. It's certainly not my favorite, but it has its own unique charms, which for me have been recently enhanced by my enjoyment of the audio book version of The Mysteries of Udolpho, a novel that Catherine, the heroine of Northanger Abbey, reads with breathless enthusiasm. (I will take a brief moment to acknowledge that a post on audio books is long overdue; the whole reason I was listening to this particular one was because I wanted to write about the medium as a way of "reading").

The naive Catherine reads The Mysteries of Udolpho, a very popular gothic novel in Jane Austen's lifetime, written by fellow female author Ann Radcliffe, and it sparks a kind of paranoid fantasy in her own life, as she sees parallels to the novel in everything, much to her detriment. As to be expected, Catherine learns her lesson and ends the novel happily, but the real pleasure of the novel is in the meditations on the art of fiction and the nature of reading. Jane Austen's genius lies partially in her ability to sneak up on the reader with profundity hidden in what feel like very minute details, so a novel about an 18 year old bookworm is really a startlingly self-aware novel about storytelling, fiction, narrative, and readership. It deserves more credit than it usually gets, and Ann Radcliffe's novel warrants a reading, if only for its own significance in context.