Author Description

Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism and biting social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics. Northanger Abbey (1817) is Austen's first completed novel but not published until after her death. While it covers Austen's usual themes of class, love, and marriage, it is also a satire of the Gothic novels popular at the time, most notably The Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Uldopho (1794). The lead character-whom Austen explicitly names her "heroine" in the text-is a young, naïve seventeen-year-old who sees mystery and intrigue wherever she looks, except in her own love life. This book is in the Deseret Alphabet, a phonetic alphabet for writing English developed in the mid-19th century at the University of Deseret (now the University of Utah).