In Jane Austen's 'Northanger Abbey', what is the name of the Gothic-obsessed heroine?

In Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey,” the Gothic-obsessed heroine is Catherine Morland. Catherine begins the novel as a cheerful, inexperienced seventeen-year-old from a large family in rural England. Her love of sensational Gothic fiction—especially Ann Radcliffe’s “The Mysteries of Udolpho”—shapes how she interprets the world around her.

When Catherine visits Bath, her vivid imagination leads her to suspect that General Tilney has committed some terrible crime at Northanger Abbey. Austen uses these suspicions to parody the melodramatic conventions of Gothic novels while also showing Catherine’s emotional growth. Catherine eventually learns to distinguish fictional atmosphere from evidence in real life.

The other options are heroines from different Austen novels: Marianne Dashwood appears in “Sense and Sensibility,” Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice,” and Emma Woodhouse in “Emma.” Catherine’s romance with Henry Tilney is central to the story, but her development from naive reader to more perceptive young woman is the novel’s deeper arc.