It occurred to me that I should have noted somewhere that in addition to Harriet's wonderful drawings, the book will contain a few dozen further images of houses, such as period engravings, photos of houses, some sketches, that sort of thing. One of my favourites is this illustration of Catherine Morland from Northanger Abbey reading a Gothic novel. I love the way the image sort of lampoons Gothic stories but also ties them to the period. You may remember how the handsome Henry Tilney teases poor Catherine, drawing on the known Gothic tropes:
He asks whether she is ‘prepared to encounter all the horrors that a building such as “what one reads about” may produce’.
Austen plays around further with the requisite Gothic 'ingredients,' as Catherine answers that she needn’t be frightened of the house, as ‘it has never been uninhabited and left deserted for years, and then the family come back to it unawares, without giving any notice, as generally happens.’ But Tilney goads her further, ‘No, certainly. -We shall not have to explore our way into a hall dimly lighted by the expiring embers of a wood fire’ nor will there be ‘gloomy passages into an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before’. However, he continues, she may be awakened by ‘a violent storm’ which will drive her out to a ‘subterraneous communication between your apartment and the chapel of St Anthony.’ This last could have come straight from the Castle of Otranto itself.