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
Persuasion (novel) the power of books over women; namely were women more susceptible to the power of reading than men, and if so, was reading a benign or malign influence on women? Austen had first taken up this question in "Northanger Abbey" where reading Gothic books has comic effects on Catherine Morland, but also gives a more acute sense of reality and to understand people. Pinch wrote that Austen returned to this theme of the power of books on women in "Persuasion", but in a more mature and probing manner, where as the novel is concerned with "... what it feels like