Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen · first published 1818
A parody of gothic novels, filmed by people who mostly played it straight.
3 versions · 1987–2007
Austen’s joke is that Catherine Morland has read too many horrid novels and expects a real house to behave like one. Adaptations tend to keep the romance and drop the reading, which leaves a pleasant story about a girl at Bath and removes the reason the book exists.
The 2007 version by Andrew Davies restores some of the fantasy sequences, and there is an American independent film, Ruby in Paradise, that borrows the shape without the costumes.
Written in the 1790s, published in 1818
Gothic novels were the publishing phenomenon of the decade — Ann Radcliffe’s were bestsellers, the circulating libraries could not keep them on the shelves, and there was a genuine public argument about whether young women should be allowed to read them at all.
Austen wrote her answer while the craze was at its height, sold the manuscript in 1803 to a publisher who then sat on it for years without printing it, and had to buy it back. By the time it reached readers, in 1818 and after her death, the fashion it teases had already passed.
On screen
3Film and television, earliest first.
- 1987 Northanger Abbey Giles Foster
- 1993 Ruby in Paradise Victor Nuñez
- 2007 Northanger Abbey Jon Jones
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.