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Tilney asks Catherine if she is fond of history, the reply is:
    I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels with popes or kings, the wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome …
    The implication is that Catherine prefers something far more exciting. Eleanor, nevertheless, declares that she herself is fond of history.
    Catherine has a brother James who becomes engaged to Isabella Thorpe, but Catherine is perplexed when, at a dance, she sees Isabella (who has previously stated that she is determined not to dance in the absence of her fiancé) dancing with Henry’s brother Captain Tilney. ‘I cannot think how it can happen!’ she says. Again, this is an indication that Catherine expects people to be true to their word and finds it disconcerting when they fail to be so.
    Having fended off several unsuitable admirers, Catherine finally settles for Henry Tilney. She is invited to the Tilney family home – Northanger Abbey – situated some 30 miles from Bath. This brings out all the romanticism in her. She relishes the prospect and ‘could not entirely subdue the hope of [discovering] some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun’. In other words, she wishes to experience something akin to what Mrs Radcliffe describes in her Gothic novels.
    Henry adds to the tension when, on the journey, he asks Catherine if she is prepared to encounter all the horrors that a building such as ‘what one reads about [in Gothic novels]’ may produce?
    Was she aware that the housekeeper Dorothy would show her to ‘an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before’? How would she react when Dorothy gave her reason to suppose that the part of the abbey in which she lodged was, undoubtedly, haunted? And how would she feel when she discovered, ‘with increased alarm’, that the door of her apartment had no lock on it? When Catherine duly arrives at Northanger Abbey and settles into her apartment she is full of anticipation.
    She notices in a recess on one side of the fireplace, ‘an immense heavy chest’. ‘What can it hold?’ she asks herself and, ‘Why should it be placed here?’ As she examines it, ‘her fearful curiosity was every moment growing greater …’ Finally, ‘her resolute effort threw back the lid’, and what did she find? Merely a cotton counterpane! This is Jane, having raised her readers’ expectations to a pitch – a device used commonly in the Gothic novel – bringing them suddenly back down to earth with a bump.
    Not to be deterred, Catherine investigates a black cabinet with a secret drawer into which a roll of papers has been pushed, ‘apparently for concealment’. Her feelings at that moment ‘were indescribable. Her heart fluttered, her knees trembled, and her cheeks grew pale’. However, before she can investigate further, there is a storm and she decides to retire to bed. The following day she examines the papers, only to discover that instead of this being an ancient manuscript, such as she had hoped for, it is simply a laundry bill, tendered for the washing of shirts, stockings, cravats and waistcoats, together with another bill from a farrier ‘to poultice [apply a warm dressing in order to reduce inflammation] [a] chestnut mare’. Catherine now realises how foolish she has been:
    Nothing could now be clearer [to her] than the absurdity of her recent fancy…. Heaven forbid that Henry Tilney should ever know her folly!
    But she still has some way to go before such ‘fancies’ are entirely dispelled.
    When General Tilney, a widower, excuses himself from going on his late wife’s favourite walk, Catherine becomes suspicious of him, and even more so when he removes a portrait of her from the drawing room, on the grounds that he isdissatisfied with it. When the General shows Catherine over