Published posthumously, Northanger Abbey is , in fast, Jane Austen's first novel. The shortest of her works, it is also the wittiest -- a light-hearted satire of Gothic novels, which were wuire rage at the time. There is the seventeen-years-old Catherine Morland, who loves such books and readily believes such mysterious and dark events to be afoot in her own world. There is John Thrope -- vain …