Her desire to be scared becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. After that, every odd quirk of the General's makes Catherine feel certain that he has a guilty conscience. Tilney died of a mysterious illness nine years earlier, and that Eleanor was not there at the time of her mother's death, she feels her suspicions of General Tilney are confirmed. As she later admits to herself, she arrives at the Abbey 'craving to be scared,' and when she finds it to be a very boring place, she makes up her own secrets. Catherine arrives at the Abbey feeling that she is in a Gothic novel herself.

The first is that she has just read a Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Anne Radcliffe, and has come to associate old buildings like Northanger Abbey with the mysterious buildings she encounters in her reading. There are several reasons why Catherine starts to believe that the General killed his wife.

What makes Catherine think the General murdered his wife? Why does she realize her mistake so quickly? She understands that people can be both good and bad, because real life is never as black-and-white as it is in the novels she reads. After Henry scolds her for this terrible and unfounded suspicion, Catherine comes to a new realization about the nature of people. She attributes General Tilney's grumpiness and odd behavior to guilt over murdering his new wife. As the novel progresses, Catherine starts trying to understand people and their motivations, although this pursuit is influenced by her overactive imagination. As a result, Catherine thinks well of almost everyone, and is frequently too charitable to such people as Isabella and John Thorpe. Catherine has difficulty identifying people's motivations, which, as Henry points out, causes her to assume that people do things for the same unimpeachable reasons she would.

In the beginning of Northanger Abbey, Catherine does not see the obvious flirtation between her brother James and her friend Isabella, and she does not understand what Isabella is doing by flirting with Frederick Tilney. Northanger Abbey is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale in which the heroine or hero sheds his or her naiveté. How has she changed by the end of the novel? Catherine is inexperienced and innocent at the beginning of the novel.

Northanger abbey sparknotes