Henry Tilney is the leading man in Jane Austen's 1817 novel Northanger Abbey.
The younger son of a local landowner, Tilney is comfortably placed as a beneficed clergyman on his father's estate.
Tilney, with his teasing yet kind-hearted mentorship of Catherine, has been considered the nicest of Austen's heroes.
[5] Frank Swinnerton considered that, as a teasing mentor, knowledgeable on female matters, Tilney might represent a disguised version of the author herself.
[7] Sydney Smith, who is known to have overlapped with Austen in Bath at the close of the eighteenth century, and whose witty conversation resembles Tilney's, has also been seen as a possible model for the character.