Northanger Abbey. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen. Jane Austen, edited by Barbara M. Benedict and Le Faye. Cambridge University Press. New York. 2006.

Book review by Tracey
Somewhere along the line I picked up an 1938 version titled The Novels of Jane Austen. I have had it for some time, but aside from flipping through and noticing that Jane had written far more than one assumes by watching her stories unfold at the movies, I really did nothing with it. I recently decided to read and review two of those stories I had never heard of before. Northanger Abbey is a tale of a perfectly boring, average girl who makes good in the end. How she does this, I cannot divulge. Her story is full of the perfect manners and morals that Ms. Austen is famous for--good over evil and all that. It typifies the time period in which the story unfolds, and there is not a lot of high drama or shocking revelation involved. Reading Ms. Austen’s novels is a little like reading Shakespeare in that you have to work a little to get the proper meaning of the vocabulary. It is different from the present day, not so much in words you don’t know the meaning of, but how those words are used. I enjoyed the story, and of course as a reader feel that Jane Austen is definitely worth reading. She wrote of her time, which makes her contemporary works more realistic to me than say someone who now writes of that past time period.

Tracey.