Northanger Abbey and the Teenage Fever Dream

This one is for my fellow fangirls

There is a phase, often fleeting, often feral, when a girl lets herself fall completely and gloriously under the spell of something. A book. A band. A boy with a crooked smile and a tragic backstory.

And for a little while, this thing consumes her. It haunts her locker door, her browser history, her sketchbooks and playlists and dreams. It doesn’t matter whether it’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ or ‘Twilight’, My Chemical Romance or Sleep Token. What matters is how it makes her feel: seen, wanted, powerful, chosen.

(See also: Saved by the Bell, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Panic at the Disco, Gilmore Girls, “your hair looks sexy pushed back”)

It’s easy to laugh at this era from a distance. The melodrama. The posters. The crying over fictional deaths or imaginary heartbreak. But that fantasy phase isn’t just indulgence. It’s identity formation. It’s survival. It’s rehearsal for a life where no one hands you the script.

Which brings me to Catherine Morland.

We read ‘Northanger Abbey’ this season for our podcast, exploring its status as a kind of adjacent text: part satire, part Gothic, part bildungsroman. But what stood out most wasn’t the parody. It was the portrait of a young girl deep in the throes of her fantasy era. Catherine doesn’t just read Gothic novels, she breathes them in like air. She imagines murders and mysteries behind every closed door. She believes the world is thick with secrets, and that she is destined to uncover them.

She is, in other words, one of us.

Austen’s genius lies not in mocking Catherine’s imagination, but in capturing it with affection and clarity. Catherine isn’t foolish, she’s young! And the systems around her; balls, carriages, marriage prospects, men twice her age treating her like an amusing puzzle, don’t exactly offer alternatives. She’s expected to navigate this world with the poise and self-awareness of a woman, despite still very much being a girl.

She is seventeen. She still wears her heart on her sleeve.

And yet, she’s spoken to like she should know better. She’s punished for getting it wrong. For letting the boundaries between fiction and reality blur. For turning a suffocating domestic atmosphere into a grand Gothic melodrama. But what else should she do? The real threat was never ghosts though. It was men like General Tilney, who wielded real power in polite silence.

Girls like Catherine learn early to read between the lines. To squint at the world until it makes emotional sense. That’s what the fantasy is for. It’s not delusion; it’s translation.

Because the truth is, Catherine wasn’t wrong. Not about everything. Her instincts were just too early, too loud, too saturated with story. That’s the curse of a Gothic girl: she can sense the danger, even if she can’t yet name it.

I remember this phase in myself, although I’ve had many. My “it's not a phase mom” moments came thick and fast and I'm not really sure I ever truly grew out of them. The was the one where I believed I was the only person who truly understood the lyrics to "I’m Not Okay (I Promise)”. The one where I annotated ‘Jane Eyre’ like it was a survival guide. The one where I whispered “he’s just misunderstood” about a boy who once lit a bin on fire.

These weren’t just silly girl moments. They were transformative. They taught me about longing, about risk, about narrative. They shaped the architecture of how I feel desire and dread. They gave me a language for loneliness before I had a diagnosis for it.

In some ways, this is the heart of dark academia too. Not just the gothic buildings and melancholic yearning, but the intense belief that story and self are inseparable. That literature isn’t an escape, it’s a mirror maze. And some of us get stuck inside it on purpose.

Girls like Catherine, like us, are often dismissed for being “too much.” Too sensitive. Too romantic. Too obsessed. But obsession is just passion with teeth. Fantasy is just hope dressed in velvet. And Catherine’s version of the world; one filled with danger, mystery, and hidden truths, might not be accurate, but it is emotionally honest.

And that matters.

Because the real danger isn’t that girls fantasise. It’s that they stop. That they’re shamed out of it too soon. That they’re told imagination is immature, that desire is cringe, that softness is weakness.

But Catherine Morland gets her happy ending, not because she gives up her imagination, but because she grows into a version of herself who can hold it with discernment. She doesn’t stop reading. She learns to read differently.

And if you’re lucky, that’s what the fantasy era gives you too. Not just the joy of imagining yourself into a story, but the skill to one day write your own.