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 Irvine also notes that the first chapters in the novel satirize the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney, whom the novel ostensibly praises, as it does the Gothic novels. An early sign that Henry Tilney is the hero while John Thorpe is not can be seen in the former's liking to read books while the latter does not. The story begins with the narrator remarking that the heroine is not really a heroine, with the narrator saying Catherine was not especially clever, nor a great beauty, and good without being virtuous. The narrator goes to say the reader was