At seventeen years old, Catherine takes a vacation to Bath, which "offers a variety of human types . . . that a girl from a village rectory could never have encountered at home" (Lauber 18). She is often uncertain of herself, not liking to spend time at gatherings in which no one present is an acquaintance of hers (Austen 12). Because Catherine is fairly new to being social, she experiences "trials and errors in 'reading'" people (Kelly) and sets a few traps for herself, unable to express herself freely or clearly. Catherine comes to discover that she is a singular type of person who prefers to read novels instead of books that could teach her something (Austen 38), and it may be due to her excessive reading of fiction that she misunderstands social interaction. With the time she spends poring over novels, she has an active imagination that causes her...
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