Catherine Morland

Catherine Morland
Gender	Female
Age	Seventeen
Occupation	Nil
Education	Home schooled
Primary residence	Northanger Abbey/Woodston Parsonage
Family
Romantic interest(s)	Henry Tilney
Parents	Mr and Mrs Morland
Sibling(s)	Multiple

Catherine Morland is the heroine of Jane Austen's early novel Northanger Abbey. A modest, kind-hearted ingénue, she is led by her reading of Gothic literature to misinterpret much of the social world she encounters.

Catherine is barely out of the schoolroom when she enters the social whirl of Bath society, and the novel centres around her attempts, often laughable, to learn about life and social realities. Many of her problems stem from her excessive tendency to take people at their own evaluations; However, while socially naive, Catherine also has an underlying sense of reality to support her; and her honesty and strength eventually see her successfully through her troubles.

Her confrontation at the Abbey itself with the novel's main father figure, General Tilney, brings matters to a head. Unable to see through his manipulations over her postulated inheritance, or to recognise him beneath his fine words as a domestic tyrant, Catherine turns to Gothic fantasy to explain her sense of unease, only to be embarrassed and humiliated when her imaginings of a gruesome murder are laid bare. Arguably, however, she has been both wrong and right in her preconscious judgement of the General, using her Gothic imaginings to articulate the gap between her experience of the General and his social facade.

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