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Gothic romances. Do you love them? Do you hate them? DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT THEY ARE? Crimson Peak director Guillermo del Toro has been spending weeks trying to explain to interviewers, critics, and audiences that his latest film isn’t really a horror film at all, but a reimagining of the classic genre. The funny thing is that writers and directors have been trying to reinvent, reboot, and make fun of the genre since its debut.

Gothic romance hit its stride in the late 18th Century. Authors like Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole churned out moody supernatural mysteries that tapped into the repressed sexual desires of Regency era women. Think of it this way: Books like The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Castle of Otranto were the Twilight of their day. Girls and women raced through them, feeding off of their dark sensuality. While later writers like the Bronte sisters would perfect gothic romance as a prestigious literary genre, Jane Austen wasn’t so kind. Sure, the author of Pride and Prejudice was inspired by the professional success of Mrs. Radcliffe, but she was quick to realize that gothic romances were feeding sheltered young women idealized versions of abusive relationships.

The first novel that Austen completed for publication (though it wasn’t released until after her death) was Northanger Abbey. It’s an outlier in her bibliography because it’s not about an inspiring heroine, but a sweet and tittering every girl. Catherine Morland is a tomboy who feels she is “in training to be a heroine,” but she’s no Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse*. She’s obsessed with gothic romances and uses examples from them to jump to all the wrong conclusions in life and love. After she falls for the charming and grounded Mr. Tilney, she visits him and his sister at their ancestral home, Northanger Abbey. Catherine expects the house to be a gothic ruin, but it’s really just a pleasant mansion. Then, Miss Morland weaves a yarn in her head about how the frosty Tilney patriarch must have murdered or imprisoned his deceased wife. Naturally, Mr. Tilney has to set her right.

The irony is that as much as Catherine is succumbing to ludicrous gothic fantasies, she’s also eventually rewarded for relying on her instincts to guide her in a world she has no preparation to understand. That world being the “dating scene.” Catherine is repeatedly boggled by the rituals of courtship, the games of flirtation, and the lusts of vain young men and women. Her only rubric for how to perceive people comes from gossip and literature. Austen isn’t criticizing the hysterical fans of gothic romance, but the society that limits young women’s interaction with their own sexuality to these ridiculous books. She knew that the real horror wasn’t a Byronic man behind a curtain, but a world where women were raised to be sexually ignorant — and therefore vulnerable to manipulation.

This is where the 2007 ITV adaptation of Northanger Abbey succeeds. The film — which starred future Oscar-nominees Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) and Carey Mulligan (An Education, The Great Gatsby) — balances the romance of the Regency period with Austen’s sharp satire. What’s more is that the film depicts Catherine’s skewed view of the world through elaborate fantasy sequences that don’t shy away from the hormones churning within the sweet girl. While Jones plays Catherine with an appropriate mix of innocence and curiosity, Carey Mulligan nails her friend Isabella Thorpe’s ignorant sexual pride. Isabella thinks she knows how the game is played, but she’s just as lost as Catherine.

A lot of Austen fans don’t rate Northanger Abbey because it’s so different from the author’s more famous works, and yet I think it’s the most important Austen novel for understanding the power literature has over a reader’s psyche. Moreover it’s a really fascinating exploration of why so many women get manic for gothic romances (or in today’s parlance, “YA”). Basically, it all boils down to sex.

[Watch Northanger Abbey on Hulu]

*When I studied Northanger Abbey back in college, 95% of the class panned the book because they found Morland’s girlish naiveté to be annoying or disappointing. This is why I like Catherine Morland and Northanger Abbey, though. Every woman wants to be a literary heroine like Elizabeth Bennet, but Jane Austen understood that quality made most of us Catherine Morlands.

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