NORTHANGER ABBEY is about a naove young woman whose head is full of the Gothic novels she consumes, and who begins to imagine that life may well be even stranger than fiction. Catherine Morland makes a touching, if somewhat charmingly brainless, heroine; Henry Tilney is a self-possessed and witty hero; and the plot device in which Catherine sees General Tilney as a black-hearted villain out of a Gothic romance is ingenious and engrossing. In fact, this early work is full of sustained and sparkling inventiveness, and exhibits the sharp and accurate social observations of Austen`s more mature fiction.