SOURCE: '"The Pen of the Contriver': The Four Fictions of Northanger Abbey," in Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, edited by John Halperin, Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 89-111.

In the following essay, Ristkok Burlin interprets Northanger Abbey as a "single, complex treatment of the theme of fiction."

In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen came to terms with her art in a single, complex treatment of the theme of fiction. Every character in this novel is implicated in the fictive process. Its heroine is a novel-reader, its hero an inveterate inventor of fictions, its villains liars, contrivers of fictions. The complicated plot is based totally on fictions, each of its major crises being precipitated by a fiction. The first crisis is obviously Catherine's discovery of the delusive nature of Gothic romances, the second crisis, her discovery of the delusive fictions of Bath. The third, and most important crisis, Catherine's sudden and...