I have met my goal of reading all Jane Austen novels this year. (I silently make the sign of the cross.)
Northanger Abbey is my last dive into the Regency era. It follows the standard formulas of attraction, miscommunication, class inequities, and misogyny. It threw in a bit of a puzzle into the mix with teasing us with a mysterious Northanger Abbey as its own character.
The benefit of knowing the canon is that the parodies, spin-offs, and spoofs all have more meaning. I now have an understanding of this genre of writing and believe I could have a thorough conversation about it. It was self-education, as painful as it was sometimes.
