French Revolution and the English Gothic Novel discussion of women's nature by having a man with the power to create new life instead of the woman, and its consequences. Jane Austen also engaged in this discussion in her gothic novel, Northanger Abbey. Catherine Morland, the protagonist of the novel, has to confront the workings of the political and economic system that involves women as chess pieces in marriages and of power relationships, after her visions of romance are over. In this novel one can also see how the mind can take a truth by means other than texts, many times removed from actual events. This speaks to
Northanger Abbey "The Monk". Isabella Thorpe gives Catherine a list of seven books that are commonly referred to as the "Northanger 'horrid' novels"; these works were later thought to be of Austen's own invention until the British writers Montague Summers and Michael Sadleir re-discovered in the 1920s that they actually did exist. The list is as follows: All seven of these were republished by the Folio Society in London in the 1960s, and since 2005 Valancourt Books has released new editions of the 'horrids', the seventh and final being released in 2015. The most significant allusion, however, is to Ann Radcliffe's "The