Northanger Abbey

“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.”

The opening line of the novel introduces both the protagonist and the important satirical dimension of the story. The narrative immediately sets up Catherine Morland as a relentlessly ordinary young woman, whose background and personality will form an ironic contrast to her gothic reading habits and overactive imagination. While the opening line is ironic in tone, it also suggests that Catherine may indeed become a “heroine” in her own way as the novel progresses.

“But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.”

The narrator’s humorous and ironic tone continues in introducing what is about to happen to Catherine: Catherine will now leave behind her usual life in Fullerton to undertake a trip to Bath with the Allens, so that a “hero” can cross her path—this foreshadows Catherine’s eventual meeting with Henry Tilney in Bath, as well as the romance that will form one of the emotional threads of the plot. The meta-nature of the narrative here also draws attention to the artificial nature of the novel itself: The narrator is acknowledging how a story is coming together right before the reader’s eyes, which reflects the novel’s recurring preoccupations with novel-reading and generic conventions more generally.