Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland is “in training for a heroine” and is obsessed with Gothic novels. During a trip to Bath, she meets the charming Henry Tilney as well as the flirtatious Isabella Thorpe and her brother. The Tilneys invite Catherine to stay at their home, Northanger Abbey; wrapt up in fantasies of the Gothic, Catherine discovers she must not apply their conventions to real life and must develop her discernment in reading — not just in books, but in the characters of her friends.