Chapter 14 deals with the walk Catherine and the Tilneys take around Beechen Cliff. Jane Austen is skillful in her realistic portrayal of Catherine as a seventeen year old girl and Catherine's views on history are an amusing example of Miss Morland the teen: "The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page, the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all -- it is very tiresome." Who can blame her for preferring Mrs. Radcliffe?

Henry and Eleanor Tilney are products of a better education than Catherine has received. Mrs. Morland has done the best she can with educating her brood, but she hasn't had the resources available to General Tilney. Thus when the Tilneys pause to observe the area from Beechen Cliff as landscape, "Catherine was quite lost. She knew nothing of drawing -- nothing of taste."