Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is a coming-of-age storey and a parody of Gothic fiction. The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox also inspired Austen (1752). Northanger Abbey was finished in 1803, making it the earliest of Austen's books to be finished in its whole, although it was published posthumously in 1817 with Persuasion. Catherine Morland, the naive teenage heroine, is the focus of the novel, and her path to a deeper knowledge of herself and the world around her. Catherine's worldview has been skewed by her love of Gothic books and her active imagination.