esolution of the difficulties she poses to her characters can be interpreted as both faithfulness to and confidence in the socioeconomic facts of life in early nine teenth-century England, neither the awareness or the respect she grants the social patterns of the period exempt the social environment itself from comment and satire. The social comment is personified in the attitudes of the characters, and it is by this means that Austen is able to comment on both society and the social psychology of the characters themselves. Austen creates characters who do not have a clear idea of their position in society or of the true character of the society itself; incident by incident, moment by moment, they achieve insight into the nature of the society's structure and into the implications of their own attitudes.
Northanger Abbey demonstrates from its opening sentence that it is to be an exercise in s
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