Northanger Abbey (version 3 Dramatic Reading)

Catherine Morland has read too many Gothic novels, and she's about to find out whether real life can live up to them. Sent to Bath for a season of society and amusement, this seventeen-year-old enthusiast of Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho arrives with a head full of dark abbeys, mysterious villains, and the certainty that something thrilling must happen to her. What she finds instead is ballroom politics, a boorish suitor named John Thorpe, and the quietly devastating Henry Tilney, a young man who seems to find her delightful precisely because of her earnest, slightly absurd imagination. When an invitation to Northanger Abbey arrives, Catherine is sure her moment has come at last. Austen, writing with a Wink that would become her signature, turns the machinery of Gothic fiction inside out, asking what happens when a young woman mistakes novels for life, and what it costs her when she must learn the difference. It's a comedy of errors wrapped in a love story, but its real subject is the gap between fantasy and reality, and the courage required to live in the latter. For anyone who has ever believed in the story they read.