Northanger Abbey [antikvár]

1 It was a source of constant disappointment to Catherine Morland that her Hfe did not more closely resemble her books. Or rather, that the books in which she found its likeness were so unexciting. Plenty of novels were set in small country villages and towns like the Dorset hamlet where she lived. Admittedly, they didn't all have such ridiculous names as the ones in the Piddle Valley where her father's group of parishes was centred. It would have been hard to make credible a romantic fiction set in Farleigh Piddle, Middle Piddle, Nether Piddle and Piddle Dummer. But in every other respect, books about country life were just like home, only duller, if that were possible. The books that made her heart beat faster were never set anywhere she had ever been. Cat, as she preferred to be known - on the basis that nobody should emerge from their teens with the name their parents had chosen - had been disappointed by her life for as long as she could remember. Her family were, in her eyes, deeply average and desperately dull. Her father ministered to five Church of England parishes with good-natured charm and a gift for sermons that were not quite entertaining but not quite