Northanger Abbey 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. 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.

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Northanger Abbey 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. 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.

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The Four Corners Familiarsseries invites contemporary artists to illustrate and produce a new edition of a classic novel or short story. This magnificent edition of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair(first published in 1847-48) is the sixth in this series, and is produced by the British artist Donald Urquhart. Urquhart's black-and-white drawing style and subject matter is perfectly suited to the themes of Vanity Fair, which follows the fortunes of its strong-minded and strong-willed anti-heroine Becky Sharp through the follies and hypocrisies of early nineteenth-century British society. Urquhart's drawings, inspired by the fashions and iconography of 1930s Hollywood, focus exclusively on Becky Sharp. "I wanted to sideline all the secondary characters," says Urquhart. The novel is newly typeset in Perpetua and Felicity (partly chosen for their feminine names), typefaces designed by Eric Gill.

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