This chapter examines whether the Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey is a spoof of Gothic fiction. It is certainly true that Northanger Abbey spoofs the Gothic novels that were so popular early in Austen's career, so this myth can take us part way toward an understanding of the novel. The problem with believing Northanger Abbey to be a “spoof” is that it assumes the novel has only this single gag: to set Catherine up and watch her fall for one ridiculous Gothic exaggeration after another. The novel is Austen's most explicitly ambitiousnovel and was intended to be her first published work, but it did not appear until December 1817, after Austen's death. By the time Austen took up her pen, Gothic strangeness itself had become so familiar as to be dismissed as convention alone, and as a result it needed itself to be defamiliarized.