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at night …’.
    Despite Mrs Allen’s over-protective attitude Catherine, from the outset, is on the lookout for excitement, and it is a disappointment to her that on the journey to Bath, ‘Neither robbers nor tempests befriended them, nor [did they experience] one lucky overturn [of the coach]’, whereby Catherine (as the heroine of the story) might be introduced to a prospective hero.
    An inordinate amount of time and trouble is taken by Mrs Allen to make sure that she and her young charge Catherine are fitted out with the appropriate clothes; the result being that when the latter accompanies Mrs Allen and her husband to aball, they do not arrive at the ballroom until late in the evening. This first visit is a disappointment on account of the Allens being strangers in the area and having no acquaintances there. When they attend the Lower Rooms, however, (both the Upper and Lower Assembly Rooms being used for dances and concerts) the Master of Ceremonies introduces Catherine to a Mr Henry Tilney, a clergyman, and after the dance she confesses to ‘a strong inclination for continuing the acquaintance’ with him.
    Mrs Allen then recognises a Mrs Thorpe with whom she had been at school. Mrs Thorpe is devoted to her children and inclined to boast about them: John being at Oxford; Edward at Merchant Taylors’ School and William at sea. At the end of chapter four of Northanger Abbey Jane, in her characteristically witty way, decides to spare her reader an account of the ‘past adventures and sufferings’ of Mrs Thorpe, ‘which otherwise might be expected to occupy the three or four following chapters …’.
    Catherine makes friends with Mrs Thorpe’s daughter Isabella, who is four years older than she, and Jane uses a conversation between the two of them to poke fun at the current obsession with the Gothic novel. Such novels reached their apotheosis in the works of that popular author of the day Mrs Ann Radcliffe (whose real life name Jane does not hesitate to use). When Isabella asks Catherine how she is enjoying Mrs Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho , the latter replies that she has got as far as ‘the black veil’, but is intrigued to know ‘what lies behind the veil’. ‘Do not tell me’, Catherine implores Isabella (who has already read the book):
    I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton [i.e. that of Mme Laurentini, a villainous character in Mysteries of Udolpho ]. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life reading it.
    This, of course, is Jane being sarcastic about the generally sycophantic attitude of the general public to this current genre of literature.
    Catherine is displeased at the ill manners of Isabella’s brother John, when he declared that his younger sisters ‘looked very ugly’. John makes matters worse when, during a dance with Catherine, he bores her to tears by talking incessantly ‘of the horses and dogs of the friend whom he had just left, and of the proposed exchange of terriers between them …’ Matters do not improve for Catherine when John takes her for a drive in his carriage. She finds him:
    insufferably vain; his equipage was altogether the most complete of its kind in England, his carriage the neatest, his horse the best goer, and himself the best coachman.
    John is equally boastful about his riding and shooting abilities.
    Catherine is reunited with Henry Tilney, whom she had met at the ball, when he, his sister Eleanor and their father General Tilney, invite her to go out walking with them. However, when they fail to arrive at the allotted time, John Allen deceives her by saying that he has seen Henry Tilney out driving in a phaeton with a ‘smart-looking girl’. John has lied because he wishes Catherine to go out with him instead. ‘How could you deceive me so …?’ she asks him. Catherine is a person who keeps her word, and she expects others to do likewise.
    When Eleanor