Northanger Abbey was written in the wake of Mary Wollstonecraft's ''A Vindication of the Rights of Woman'' (1792), which made bold calls for improvement in the rights, opportunities, and treatment of women, had a mixed reception at the time, and led Wollstonecraft to be considered by some as a dangerous influence.
Northanger also engages with and alludes to several works which could be categorized as Gothic, the most prominent being The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe.
Within Austen's oeuvre, Northanger Abbey is sometimes classified as belonging to a collection of short fiction, poetry, and plays that were never published called her Juvenilia, other times considered a novel...
