• Northanger Abbey

  • By: Jane Austen
  • Narrated by: Anna Massey
  • Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (1,030 ratings)
Northanger Abbey  By  cover art

Northanger Abbey

By: Jane Austen
Narrated by: Anna Massey

Publisher's summary

Catherine Morland reads tales of Gothic romance, yet leads a country life in Wiltshire. When she travels to Bath, she meets and falls in love with Henry Tilney. She is invited by his sister and father to stay at Northanger Abbey, where she meets all the trappings of Gothic horror that she has read about. Fortunately, she has her own good sense and irresistible but unsentimental hero, Henry Tilney.
©1989, 2008 BBC Audiobooks Ltd (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

What listeners say about Northanger Abbey

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  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    628
  • 4 Stars
    272
  • 3 Stars
    106
  • 2 Stars
    18
  • 1 Stars
    6
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
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  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
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    540
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    231
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    102
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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

A pleasing but too serious narrator

I enjoyed the story but I felt the narrator was too serious a reader, especially in comedic moments. Also she made the playful and teasing Henry Tilney sound very severe and thus the book took on a more serious note than what this gothic parody might have required. Nonetheless, her voice is pleasing though perhaps too serious and her proper enunciation slows down the reading. If you read along with the narrator you may read faster and thus may need to increase the speed to 1.25x though it does sound a bit too fast and chipmunk-ish.

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9 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Bad Narrator

I've always like Jane Austen and have read, listened to or watched performances of several of her stories. But with this one I couldn't get past listening for a half hour. The narrator's voice and inflection was borderline to screeching. Never did finish listening to it.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Not for everyone

If you know who Anna Massey was, and if you’ve already listened to another performance of Northanger Abbey, then you might get a little enjoyment from this. (I think you should also have read the book before listening to this.)

Massey played Mrs Norris (brilliantly) in an early-80s adaptation of Mansfield Park. She was also an eerily cold mother in an Inspector Morse episode. (Those are the places I’ve seen her, anyway.) Here she puts on her very poshest accent (possibly that’s the accent she always used) to read Jane Austen. At times her readings remind me rather strongly of the cadences and diction of actors in movies of the 1930s and 40s. (Which means that her posh accent sometimes sounds almost like a “mid-Atlantic” accent.)

Unfortunately, Massey doesn’t have what seems to my ears a great sense of timing. In exchanges of dialogue, for example, she frequently begins one person’s speech while still drawing breath after the previous persons speech. Sometimes her characters speak very rapidly indeed, as if they are not speaking but trying to get through a speech as quickly as possible, and some of them are annoyingly harsh and monotonous: that is not so bad in General Tilney, but in his son Henry, who is supposed to be a sympathetic character, the effect is off-putting.

It’s not completely terrible, but it’s also not very approachable compared to really excellent modern readers like Juliet Stevenson.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Disappointed

It was a struggle. I didn't finish and removed it from my library. I gave the story 4 stars but I really don't have an opinion. The narrator isn't very good to my ear. Her voice for male characters needs some more work. She is why I removed it from my library.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars
  • SN
  • 10-11-18

Ferociously smart, hilarious, romantic

The real love story here is between a girl and her books -- this is Jane Austin's astute, no-holds barred, and deeply funny satire of the Gothic genre as a whole. She deconstructs it, plays with it, both makes fun of and shows serious respect for the readers of it -- and as icing on the cake, Henry Tilney is one of Austen's most delectable male love interests.

If language and eloquence turns you on, this is your book.

Oh, my one minor complaint about this listening experience is that occasionally the chapters have hardly any pause between one and the next (leaving not much time to digest a powerful final sentence) while at other times the pauses between chapters are so long I thought the book had stopped. The narrator is great, though, and clearly has a wonderful time.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Masterful dramatization of a wonderful book

The book is wonderful and Anna Massey is ever amazing. The audio book chapters are not properly separated, and instead the audio "chapters" are lengthy periods of time (45 minutes+) that make it difficult to navigate.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Funny Social Satire

The gentle fun that Austen pokes at addicts of Gothic literature is very apropos of today - 'plus ca change, plus ca meme chose!' Very enjoyable.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

I give this 4.5 stars/two enthusiastic thumbs up

I have an hour drive to school, and I listened to this for my British Literature course early in the semester. The narrator was very good and the story as amusing as one can expect from any Austen novel. Out of all the other choices available for this book, I most liked this one for the narrator's clearness, speed, and the different voices she used for the characters. (I was a bit annoyed with the chapter breaks at first - I think? I've got almost a full load of lit classes this semester and all the audio books are beginning to blend together! - since they didn't stop at the book's chapter breaks, but it didn't really matter)

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Kind of glitchy but worth it!

Not one of Jane Austen most famous works, but such a delightful story! So much joy and giggles from listening to this story! The narrator did such a great job! The recording itself seemed to jump and skip in certain places and I would have to go back to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Eh...great since it’s free...

The Narration was fine, but did get a little monotonous... such slow fine talk on such petty detailed narrative got a little old, but I made it through! I had a hard time figuring out how to read it... at first it seemed like it was sarcastic and humorous, but then turned a little bitter, then scary and suspenseful... so I think I need some education on it. I particularly enjoyed Jane Austen's candid and open talk about her theories on writing. "Novels are to be written this way or that..." And "readers most enjoy this and that"(paraphrases of course). I found this humorous and helpful at the same time.
The characters probably will not hold a strong impression in my heart or life, but they are honest characters whom I expect to see and now at least recognize in my own experience and in my own short life time.

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1 person found this helpful