The Making of an Unlikely Heroine — Northanger Abbey

Austen opens by deflating every Gothic heroine cliché: Catherine Morland is plain, cheerful, and raised in a large healthy family with no tragic backstory, dead mother, or tyrannical father locking daughters away. Her father is a comfortable clergyman named Richard; her mother survives repeated childbirths with rude good health. Catherine as a child prefers cricket to dolls, fails at music and drawing, shirks French, and rolls down hills instead of collecting accomplishments, yet she is kind to her younger siblings and not actually wicked.

By fifteen she improves in looks and begins curling her hair and longing for balls. From fifteen to seventeen she reads novels and stockpiles dramatic quotations she expects to quote in future crises. She still cannot draw a lover's profile because she has no lover. Fullerton offers no romantic material: no lord, no baronet, no mysterious ward, no handsome stranger left on the doorstep, and not even a squire's son in the parish.

When wealthy neighbours Mr. and Mrs. Allen invite Catherine to Bath for his gout, her parents agree readily and Catherine is thrilled. An ordinary girl in an unromantic village is about to be sent where something can actually happen, and Austen has already told us her heart is affectionate and her disposition open.