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2 unusual facts about Northanger Abbey


Milsom Street, Bath

As a fashionable Georgian thoroughfare, Milsom Street is quoted in several of the works of Jane Austen, including Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

Northanger Abbey

:"I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time."


1817 in literature

The year 1817 in literature involved some significant new books, including Walter Scott's Rob Roy, Lord Byron's Manfred, Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and the death of Jane Austen and posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

Montague Summers

Montague Summers also produced important studies of the Gothic fiction genre and edited two collections of Gothic horror short stories, as well as an incomplete edition of two of the seven obscure Gothic novels, known as the Northanger Horrid Novels, mentioned by Jane Austen in her Gothic parody Northanger Abbey.

The Mysteries of Udolpho

Often cited as the archetypal Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, along with Radcliffe's novel "The Romance of the Forest," plays a prominent role in Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey, in which an impressionable young woman, after reading Radcliffe's novel, comes to see her friends and acquaintances as Gothic villains and victims with amusing results.


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