Radcliffe and her peers id not unexpected, nor creditable of censure: the lack in her everyday life of excitement persuades Catherine to read fanciful stories, and to wish her life as eventful as the lives of her literary heroines. This wishful thinking soon colours her own experiences, so that Tilney's disappearance from Bath is construed as a "sort of mysteriousness" which makes Henry more attractive. .
Catherine indulges by looking in her own life for gothic excitement. Henry Tilney's story that he tells her on the way to Northanger Abbey is a key example of where her Northanger gothic fantasies begin. Austen produces discussion among the novel's principal characters of different kinds of taste in reading, suggesting that enjoyment of Gothic fantasy should be balanced by reading literature of other kinds. She shows here how a "lack of variety in reading" may produce an expectation that life will be as depicted in the works (in this case romantic fiction) to which one's reading is restricted.
Austen completely ridicules gothic literature through Catherine's thoughts concerning the Tilney's home at Northanger Abbey. The satire of conventional literature is ubiquitous throughout the novel and is not anticipated to be subtle to the obscure reader. Although our generation is would not have been her target audience, the reader can still recognise the contrast of both the conventional and satirical forms of literature. Northanger Abbey although a modern and pleasant place of residence is transformed into a creepy gothic castle with torture chambers where murders have occurred and people are kept prisoner. This is clearly a mockery of the gothic, which is mentioned several times throughout the novel and is finally humorously brought to life in Catherine's imagination. If Northanger Abbey was truly meant to be a gothic novel then the descriptions of the Tilney residence and Catherine's suspensions would certainly have been justified.