Bookseller Created
Leaf-Peeping Literature!
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores!
Start gifting
Send as gift
Add to Wish List
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop small, give big!
With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.
Start gifting
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up todayNorthanger Abbey
Narrator
Wanda McCaddon
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn more
Length
7 hours 34 minutes
Language
English
Jane Austen's first major novel, a parody of the popular literature of the time, is an ironic tale of the romantic folly of men and women in pursuit of love, marriage, and money. The humorous adventures of young Catherine as she encounters "the difficulties and dangers of a six weeks' residence in Bath" lead to some of Austen's most brilliant social satire. There is Catherine's hilarious liaison with a paragon of bad manners and boastfulness, her disastrous friendship with an unforgettably crass coquette, and a whirl of cotillion dances with their timeless mortifications. A visit to ancient Northanger Abbey, the ancestral home of the novel's handsome hero, excites the irrepressible Catherine's hopes of romance amid gothic horrors. But what awaits her there is a drama of a different kind. This novel is the most youthfully exuberant and broadly comic of Jane Austen's works.
Jane Austen (1775–1817) is considered by many scholars to be the first great woman novelist. Born in Steventon, England, she later moved to Bath and began to write for her own and her family’s amusement. Her novels, set in her own English countryside, depict the daily lives of provincial middle-class families with wry observation, a delicate irony, and a good-humored wit.
Wanda McCaddon (d. 2023) narrated well over six hundred titles for major audiobook publishers, sometimes with the pseudonym Nadia May or Donada Peters. She earned the prestigious Audio Award for best narration and numerous Earphones Awards. She was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine.
Reviews
“About an imaginative young woman who reads too many Gothic novels, the story is Austen’s most lighthearted.”
“Northanger Abbey, her most youthful and in many ways her most brillant novel…at times dares us to pay close attention to the artistic positions and processes her other novels tend to relegate to the background.”
“[Austen] uses her rapier wit to mock not only the essential silliness of ‘horrid’ novels, but to expose the even more horrid workings of polite society…In many respects Northanger Abbey is the most lighthearted of Jane Austen’s novels, yet at its core is a serious, unsentimental commentary on love and marriage, nineteenth-century British style.”
“Combines a satire on conventional novels of polite society with one on gothic tales of terror.”
Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores!
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks