During an eventful season at Bath, young, naïve Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine’s love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father’s mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination … influenced by novels of sensation and intrigue, Catherine imagines terrible crimes committed by General Tilney. With its broad comedy and irrepressible heroine, this is the most youthful and and optimistic of Jane Austen’s works.
more
“Northanger Abbey” gives me the sense that the author is having fun. I find that merriment contagious.
“Persuasion” is my favourite Austen, followed by “Pride and Prejudice”, but for sheer fun I think Northanger Abbey is hard to beat. It doesn’t have the level of complexity, the layers of meaning, all the symbolism of a work like Mansfield Park, but that’s not a criticism, just an observation. What it does have in abundance is Jane’s genius for wit.
We have Matthew Lewis, author of THE MONK (1796) to thank for this Jane Austen novel about a young woman named Catherine Morland who wishes she could live life inside a Gothic novel like the ones being written by Lewis and Ann Radcliffe and others around the start of the 19th century. Another term we coined for Gothic novels was the “novel of sensation” because they made you feel big sensations, like horror. Thanks to Lewis and friends, nowadays we not only have serious novels, but we also have everything that isn’t a serious novel, including mysteries, romances, fantasies and sci-fi’s. Austen didn’t really fit with that crowd so she wrote this book to show what can happen if you read too many novels of sensation. Cervantes also did this in DON QUIXOTE (1625) and so did Flaubert in MADAME BOVARY (1856). In the Novel of Sensation, when you suspect the people next door to you might be doing the most horrible things imaginable, you always turn out to be right. In a regular novel, you’re always wrong — the truth is actually more complicated. Catherine spends the greater portion of this book going around believing the worst about people, and scaring herself, and feeling dissatisfied with reality anytime it isn’t horrible or tragic. It’s almost like a psychotic state and it starts to cause her real harm. At one point she tells a man she’s smitten with, named Henry Tilney, whose house she is visiting, that she has uncovered evidence that his father kept his mother isolated for years in a shabby part of the house, then murdered her. Henry sets her straight, harshly, and that’s when she realizes she’s been slightly out of her mind for a long time. But possibly this game she’s been playing in her head was to distract herself from the harsh reality of young adulthood. The problem is that everyone around her is scrambling to find a suitable husband or wife like there’s no tomorrow — which there kind of isn’t since life expectancy was about 45. To be suitable in this set means you’ve got the money worked out. How much money? 400 pounds a year. That’s what Catherine’s brother James stands to make as a parson and, for that sum, her friend Isabella is just willing to gamble on him. But then dashing Capt. Tilney, Henry’s brother, turns up, with more than 400 a year, so Isabella instantly drops James to pursue the captain. The other Tilney’s, meanwhile, are warming to Catherine, because their grandfather, the general, hears a rumor she might be worth 10,000. She’s not. The more we learn, the more cold-blooded the whole social scheme looks, until Catherine’s earlier morbid imaginings don’t seem nearly morbid enough.
I get that it’s a play on the other popular books at the time, and it did still have a lot of classic Austen elements (hilariously awful friends, misunderstandings, and plot-stirring letters), but I think it needed a little more. Catherine was just a sweet fool, but I think Henry Tilney might be the best of the Austen heroes and deserved better.
This is my least favorite Jane Austen novel, but it is still a Jane Austen novel! The personality of her writing and the current that runs through all her stories is present. But I find this to be the most depressing of her stories (I always wonder if it’s because I’m American and a lot of what I dislike seems to be mindsets that were very deeply engrained in English culture of the time…).
Great read. Everything she has written is exceptional. I love the pictures she paints of an older time. I really enjoy her characters. I have read all of her books and enjoyed every one of them.
I first read this book in college for a Jane Austen author study class and I wasn’t particularly interested in this one back then, but recently I have been rereading her novels to see how my opinions have changed since then, and lo and behold, my past opinions have done a complete 180! I think being able to read it for fun this time around, but also having more background context about the novel itself thanks to that college class, I was better able to pick up on the incredible wittiness of this particular Jane Austen classic. This one is very different from her other novels in that the romance factor takes more of a backseat to the much heavier social commentary that flows throughout this novel. It was intended to be a satirical commentary about novels in general, but particularly Gothic novels and those who read them. Through the narrator’s occasional interjections and the very opinionated characters you meet in this novel, you will be able to glean what stance Austen took on this argument.
Historical context aside, I was so surprised at how much fun I had by the end of this reading. Of all of Austen’s novels, this one is, in my opinion, her absolute funniest. The narrator, who is the “author” of this story, perhaps a satire of Austen herself, occasionally pops in to pause the narrative and offer either dry witticisms or pointed opinions on the matters at hand. The characters are interesting, frustrating, endearing, and sometimes downright ridiculous, and I was fascinated at how invested I became in the growth of these characters. Catherine, our protagonist, is a girl obsessed with Gothic novels and the drama and intrigue they can provide to an inexperienced young woman. She is so frustratingly naive at times, but by the end is so endearing and has matured for the better through her experiences. Henry Tilney, the “romantic lead,” does not provide the same kind of romantic tension that other Austen leading men tend to do, but the budding relationship between Catherine and Henry is perhaps much more relatable in how is slowly progresses from a new friendship to a deeper love for one another; and considering the purpose of this novel, it works very well for this narrative and though for me it didn’t have the same romantic satisfaction as the end with they finally got together that other Austen novels provide, I was very happy for them as I would be for two friends who finally got together after flirting with each other for way longer than they should have.
All in all, I have to say this book greatly surprised me in going from probably one of my least favorites (if it even made the list) to permanently situating itself as one of my all time Jane Austen favorites. If you read this one back in school or read it a long time ago and didn’t really like it, I’d strongly encourage you to give it another try and maybe do a quick Google search to get a little bit of the historical context so you can pick up better on the dry wit and sarcasm of this novel. Same for if you’re going to read it for the first time. I think it made just that bit of difference in my experience this time around and I truly just had a lot of fun reading this one again.