A passage from the novel appears as the preface of Ian McEwan's Atonement, thus likening the naive mistakes of Austen's Catherine Morland to those of his own character Briony Tallis, who is in a similar position: both characters have very over-active imaginations, which lead to misconceptions that cause distress in the lives of people around them. Both treat their own lives like those of heroines in fantastical works of fiction, with Miss Morland likening herself to a character in a Gothic novel and young Briony Tallis writing her own melodramatic stories and plays with central characters such as "spontaneous Arabella" based on herself.
Richard Adams quotes a portion of the novel's last sentence for the epigraph to Chapter 50 in his Watership Down; the reference to the General is felicitous as the villain in Watership Down is also a General.[80]
Jasper Fforde, in his alternate history comic fantasy novel First Among Sequels, refers to Northanger Abbey as being under maintenance and "should be ready on time as long as Catherine stops attempting to have the book 'Gothicized'." It appears again as the prize in a reality program, based on the lives of the Bennets from Pride and Prejudice.[81]
