When seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland is invited to Northanger Abbey, the grand and forbidding ancestral seat of her suitor, Henry Tilney, she allows the Gothic novels she's obsessed with to fill her mind with terrible suspicions. What is the mystery surrounding the death of Henry's mother? Is the family concealing a terrible secret within the elegant rooms of the Abbey? Can she trust Henry, or is he part of an evil conspiracy? Determined to see herself as the heroine of a dark and thrilling romance, Catherine becomes embroiled in a real drama of misapprehension, mistreatment, and mortification, until common sense—and a clarification of her financial status—puts all to right.