All Jane Austen part 4

Northanger Abbey

The 2007 version starring Felicity Jones and JJ Fields

plot: After Catherine is asked to join friends of  her parents on a vacation, she finds herself thrown into dramas better then anything she could have read in her books. Her brother James, is recently engaged to Isabella Thorpe, and in turn Catherine begins a friendship with both Isabella and her brother John. This friendship becomes one that dives Catherine from her own love interest Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor.
While staying with the Tilney's, Catherine; having read her favourite ghost stories starts to believe that their father has murdered their mother, and begins snooping around the estate for proof. She gets caught and is thrown out in the middle of the night, left to survive on her own. Meanwhile, all the time her brother James has been away for school, Isabella has been less then faithful to him, starting up an affair with the oldest Tilney brother. Finding herself now unwanted by both men, Isabella begs Catherine for her help in talking James into taking her back. But it's too late, as Catherine wants nothing to do with her.
Henry's father disowns him when he finds out that he's in love with Catherine, after learning the Thorpes lied about how much money Catherine's family really has.  Henry, now poor, confesses his love to Catherine and are married.

This post feels a bit like a cop out, given there are only two adaptions that I've heard of.  I talked about this back in year one (day 173)

This story was originally published in 1818, and has never been out of print. That's staying power.
The main themes here are trust, innocence, betrayal, honesty, and imagination.
The heroine is a bit of a rebel for the times, listed as a bit of a tomboy, and spending all her time reading gothic novels and talking about the stories. She spends much of her time in her own head having wild teenaged fantasies about the novels. This leads to her jumping to conclusions about her friends.
She finds herself at the wrong end of peer pressure, being swept away in the idea of what her friends represent and less of what the reality of it is.

All the characters end up having their dreams shattered in one way or another, and find themselves loosing their faith in each other.
You see how rumours and secrets end up dividing all the couples and how easily reputations can be dirtied.

This is said to be the first story Jane Austen wrote but the one of the last to have been published. You can see her own innocence about romance and society as well as writing itself within the lead character. 

Okay...till later...