Point of who?

When discussing the point of view of Northanger Abbey in class today, we covered the benfits and drawbacks of both first and third person. However, it seems to me that we missed an important qualification in the third person perspective. It is common knowledge that third person always refers to an outside narrator explaining the plot; however, we failed to take into account the different between limited and omniscient third person narrators. A limited third person has only the same amount of knowledge as one character, usually the protagonist. An omniscient third person knows everything- the past, present, and future thoughts and actions of every single character. Obviously such an important distinction would influence how the reader interprets the novel. Northanger Abbey's narrator displays some qualities of both limited and omniscient, but in my opinion heavily leans towards limited. The narrator primarily discusses Catherine's inner dialogue, and is mostly blocked off from the other character's minds. The reader has to discover the traits of the other characters purely through interpreting their dialogue and actions. Only in very few parts of the book does the narrator display some knowledge beyond what Catherine knows, such as in the beginnning when he or she hints that Catherine will become a heroine. The narrator mostly has access to only the information Catherine has at any given point, which of course affects our perception of the story and makes it slightly more similar to a first person narrative.