Jane Austen

NORTHANGER ABBEY - Jane Austen

Northanger Abbey was written in 1798 but not published until after Austen's death in 1817, Northanger Abbey is characteristically clearheaded and strong, and infinitely subtle in its comedy. The book is both a perfectly aimed literary parody and a withering satire of the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century. But most of all, it is the story of the initiation into life of its naïve but sweetly appealing heroine, Catherine Morland, a willing victim of the contemporary craze for Gothic literature who is determined to see herself as the heroine of a dark and thrilling romance. When Catherine is invited to Northanger Abbey, the grand though forbidding ancestral seat of her suitor, Henry Tilney, she finds herself embroiled in a real drama of misapprehension, mistreatment, and mortification, until common sense and humor-and a crucial clarification of Catherine's financial status-puts all to right. . THE RAILWAY CHILDREN - E. NESBIT 193 - 710The Railway Children is a children's book by Edith Nesbit, originally serialised in The London Magazine during 1905 and first published in book form in 1906. It has been adapted for the screen several times, of which the 1970 film version is the best known Edith Nesbit wrote with supreme confidence about the lives of children and Roberta, Peter, and Phyllis, the trio in The Railway Children, reflect her faith in the resourcefulness, capacity for adventure, and instinctive heroism of the young