Journaling with Jane Day 5: Northanger Abbey

Catherine Morland is an avid novel reader, steeped in the Romantic Gothic tradition. Her imagination is filled with abbeys, ruins and all the scenery of the picturesque. As Northanger Abbey progresses Catherine starts to look at the world less with a mind full of stories and to see things perhaps more as they are. Jane was an avid reader, indeed reading many books mentioned in Northanger Abbey and was a passionate defender of the joy of a novel.

Today we celebrate both novels and the imagination, as we step into the world of the novel and all that is has given to us.

Here are some further prompts:

• How important is reading to you?
• What story would you tell if you could?
• What literary world would you enter?

Northanger Abbey centres on the contemporary debate around the appropriateness of reading novels and their impact on the mind.

For a further Romantic-era prompt, inspired by Northanger Abbey, we suggest:

• Are novels a good guide to life?
• Has what you have read shaped the way you think?