by Jane Austen
2 (p. 165) ”I am sure your father, Miss Morland, would agree with me in thinking it expedient to give every young man some employment“: General Tilney’s ideas about requiring his sons to have professions link him to the educational theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), though Rousseau thought everyone should know some manual trade.
3 (p. 166) beautiful even in the leafless month of March: It was February when Catherine Morland reached Bath. See note 2 to chapter IX and note 1 to chapter XXIX.
CHAPTER XXIII
1 (p. 171) ”This lengthened absence, these solitary rambles, did not speak a mind at ease, or a conscience void of reproach“: In William Godwin’s The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), Mr. Faulkner, a tyrannical man plagued by guilt, is much given to long, solitary walks and extended absences. Caleb Williams hovers between the novel of ideas (denunciation of social inequities) and the novel of character, but uses the melodrama of the gothic romance to enhance reader interest. Godwin, husband of the proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), was the father of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), yet another novel of ideas masquerading as a gothic romance.
2 (p. 175) It was no wonder that the General should shrink from the sight of such objects as that room must contain; ... and left him to the stings of conscience: Catherine imagines General Tilney a guilt-ridden murderer, much in the style of Mr. Faulkner in Caleb Williams (see note directly above).
3 (p. 176) It was the air and attitude of a Montoni!: In Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Count Montoni is the villain who locks up the heroine’s aunt.
CHAPTER XXIV
1 (p. 180) She could remember dozens who had persevered in every possible vice... till a violent death or a religious retirement closed their black career: Catherine has transformed General Tilney into a villain from gothic romance.
2 (p. 180) Catherine had read too much not to be perfectly aware of the ease with which a waxen figure might be introduced: On page 34 Catherine is anxiously wondering what Radcliffe’s character Emily will find behind the black veil. What she finds is a life-like wax figure, a memento mori, or reminder to the living of the proximity of death.
3 (p. 184) ”A faithful promise!—That puzzles me“: Henry teases Catherine, as on page 100, about a lax use of language. Here he hints that Isabella’s promises and her fidelity may be unreliable.
4 (p. 186) ”consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from?“: Henry tries to show Catherine that her literary suspicions about General Tilney are absurd. He seeks to disabuse her of the delusions she has created as a result of transposing gothic romance into life. He reminds her, and the reader, that life is not like that. The narrator confirms Catherine’s restoration to reality on page 187.
CHAPTER XXV
1 (p. 188) a mind which... had been craving to be frightened: One of the main intentions of gothic romance was to frighten; that was also one of its principle pleasures.
2 (p. 188) Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works... it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for: Here is Austen’s strongest indictment of the utility of gothic romance as a tool to gauge reality. Setting, action, and character in that genre belong to a world far away from the ”midland counties of England.“ At the same time that she liberates Catherine from the melodrama of romance, Austen opens the way for her to observe and evaluate those around her. Catherine will no longer see them as angels or devils (that is, as characters in a romance), but as people with virtues and defects.
3 (p. 190) Thank God! I am undeceived in time!: James’s eyes are opened to Isabella’s fortune-hunting ways, so he is no longer ”deceived“ by false love. His awakening parallels Catherine’s own in regard to gothic romance.
4 (pp. 192-193) ”Frederick will not be the first man who has chosen a wife with less sense than his family expected“: Henry’s observation will soon haunt him; Catherine, in the eyes of General Tilney, will cease to be a proper match for him.
CHAPTER XXVI
1 (p. 196) Their persuasion that the General would ... oppose the connexion, turned her feelings moreover with some alarm towards herself: Catherine realizes the General’s likelihood of rejecting Isabella on economic grounds could affect her future with Henry. Now she is behaving as a novelistic character should.
2 (p. 198) ”our pleasures in this world are always to be paid for, ...giving ready-monied actual happiness for a draft on the future, that may not be honoured“: Henry says he must sacrifice the happiness he has (being with Catherine and Eleanor), which he equates with cash in hand (ready money), for the sake of a future happiness that may not materialize (the trip to Woodston, which could be canceled because of bad weather).
3 (p. 200) there was nothing so charming to her imagination as the unpretending comfort of a well-connected parsonage: Austen is describing a smaller, more manageable house than General Tilney’s, one that fits in with the landscape and did not seek to change it. The term ”well-connected“ was used in contemporary landscape theory to imply a harmonious balance between human need (buildings and farms) and managed nature.
CHAPTER XXVIII
1 (p. 213) What could all this mean but an intentional affront?: Catherine correctly concludes that General Tilney deliberately intends to insult her. She cannot understand that he thought her family and his were equals in fortune; learning they are not, he treats her as a social inferior to whom no courtesy is due. She treats the incident personally when in fact it is a social matter.
CHAPTER XXIX
1 (p. 217) even after an absence such as her‘s—an eleven weeks absence: Catherine has been away from her family in Fullerton for more than two months. See above note 2 to chapter IX (p. 240) and note 3 to chapter XXII (p. 243) for other references to the passage of time.
2 (p. 218) she travelled on for about eleven hours ... and between six and seven o’clock in the evening found herself entering Fullerton: In other words, Catherine left Northanger Abbey at about seven A.M. and spent more than eleven hours in traveling 70 miles.
3 (p. 222) ”it could not be a desirable thing to have him engaged to a girl ... so entirely without fortune“: Mrs. Morland reacts with relief that James did not marry Isabella Thorpe. Her reaction is clearly a parallel to General Tilney’s reaction to the news that Catherine is not wealthy.
CHAPTER XXX
1 (p. 226) ”There is a very clever Essay in one of the books up stairs upon much such a subject... ‘The Mirror’ “: The Mirror was a publication aimed at helping the emerging middle classes deal with problems of decorum. It was presented as a series of letters. In this case, Mr. Homespun’s daughters turn into snobs after visiting with an aristocratic lady. See number 12 (March 6, 1779), a letter from Mr. Homespun: ”Consequence to Little Folks of Intimacy with Great Ones.“
2 (p. 228) his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought: He loves her because she loved him, in other words. This is an idea that resonates in English literature : Shakespeare’s Desdemona falls in love with Othello listening to his war stories, and he falls in love with her because of her rapture. What is clearly removed from such a relationship is erotic passion.
3 (p. 230) he almost instantly determined to spare no pains ... ruining his dearest hopes: General Tilney’s behavior toward John Thorpe with regard to Catherine parallels his son Frederick’s behavior toward Isabella and Catherine’s brother James. Each seeks to break up a relationship, the General to make a good match for his son Henry, Frederick for sport.
4 (p. 231) confessed himself to have been totally mistaken in his opinion of their circumstances ... by the rhodomontade: Rhodomontade (also spelled rodomontade) means pretentious boasting. The word derives from the name of a character (Rodomonte) in the verse romance Orlando Innamorato (Roland in Love; c.1506)
, by Matteo Maria Boiardo. The character also appears in the sequel Orlando Furioso (Roland Insane, 1532), by Ludovico Ariosto.
CHAPTER XXXI
1 (p. 235) the rules of composition forbid the introduction of a character not connected with my fable: A fable is often a moral tale in which animals have the main roles, as in Aesop’s Fables. Here Austen alludes to fiction as make-believe.
An Inspiration for Northanger Abbey
”Those ingenious moderns ... have swallowed all the solemnities of the Mysteries of Udolpho, and never even seen the joke of Northanger Abbey.“
—G. K. CHESTERTON
Of Jane Austen’s six major novels, Northanger Abbey was the first written (begun around 1798) but the last published (in a combined edition with Persuasion in 1818). At the time she wrote Northanger Abbey, a period spanning her childhood and maturity, Austen was evolving past the spoofing style of her juvenilia and becoming the author of comedies of manners, and the novel contains elements of both her youthful parodies and her refined observation of societal mores.
The first half of Northanger Abbey resembles the mature works, while the second half parodies gothic conventions, making it consistent with her early writings, which were mostly humorous imitations. The gothic novel, usually set in a castle, tends toward the sensational and melodramatic. It often pits a helpless and, frequently, orphaned young woman against a cunning, predatory male, and typically utilizes the supernatural, the grotesque, and the bizarre to bring sanity and rationality to their breaking points.
The second volume of Northanger Abbey was written to caricature The Mysteries of Udolpho ( 1794) , by Ann Radcliffe, one of the most popular novels of its day. Radcliffe’s work is the prototypical gothic novel, along with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), which inaugurated the genre. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, the evil Count Montoni imprisons Emily St. Aubert in his dark mountain castle after the death of her parents. Rotting corpses, unexplained noises, and musky cellars terrorize Emily until she escapes on the arm of the noble Valencourt. Radcliffe also inspired Matthew Gregory Lewis to write The Monk ( 1796) , which Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland mentions reading; Lewis’s novel, very popular in its day, is an outlandish tale of an abbot drawn into a world of incest, murder, and torture. Radcliffe influenced many other writers, including Sir Walter Scott, the Marquis de Sade, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe.
In the second half of Northanger Abbey, Catherine becomes engrossed in The Mysteries of Udolpho. Austen critiques the fright ening fantasies such novels put into the minds of readers by parodying the sensational imagination gone awry. On the trip from Bath to Northanger Abbey, in chapter XX, Tilney humorously concocts a fearful story about the ancient terrors that will befall Catherine at the decrepit castle. He warns that she will encounter a “violent storm.... a dagger ... some instrument of torture” (p. 149) and, horror of horrors, the “memoirs of the wretched Matilda” (p. 150). When the party finally arrives at Northanger Abbey, it turns out to be rather ordinary—modern even, with the gothic stained-glass windows removed. When Catherine opens the mysterious cabinet, Austen toys with the gothic convention of the anticipation of mishap, but Catherine’s expectations of unnamed horrors are deflated; she finds only laundry bills.
In chapter VI (p. 34), Isabella lists for Catherine her favorite gothic novels, a group of titles that has become known as the Northanger Canon: Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian; Or, the Confessional of the Black Penitents ( 1797) ; The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and Mysterious Warnings (1796), by Eliza Parsons; Clermont: A Tale (1798), by Regina Maria Roche; The Necromancer; Or, the Tale of the Black Forest: Founded on Facts (1794), by Lawrence Flammenberg; The Midnight Bell: A German Story Founded on Incidents in Real Life (1798), by Francis Lathom; The Orphan of the Rhine: A Romance 1798) , by Eleanor Sleath; and Horrid Mysteries: A Story from the German of the Marquis of Grosse (1796) , by Carl Grosse.
Northanger Abbey was not Austen’s first parody. On the contrary, it was her final such work. While Austen’s mature novels are noted for their subtle social commentary and lack of political opinions, her juvenilia veers more toward exaggeration and spoof. Love and Freindship (sic), written in 1790 when Austen was fifteen, caricatures the cartoonish sentimental novel, a genre popular in the mid-eighteenth century that was closely related to the gothic novel. Another early Austen work, The History of England: From the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st, lampoons the history books she read as a child. Composed in 1791 by a “partial, prejudiced, and ignorant historian,” it contained the warning: “N.B. There will be very few dates in this history.”
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
COMMENTS
Jane Austen
You are very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which might recommend me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe-Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.
—from a letter to J. S. Clarke (April 1, 1816)
Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges
When I knew Jane Austen, I never suspected that she was an authoress; but my eyes told me she was fair and handsome, slight and elegant, but with cheeks a little too full. The last time I think that I saw her was at Ramsgate in 1803: perhaps she was then about twenty-seven years old. Even then I did not know she was addicted to literary composition.
—from his Autobiography (1834)
Margaret Oliphant
Northanger Abbey is once more on the higher level. Such a picture of delightful youth, simplicity, absurdity, and natural sweetness, it is scarcely possible to parallel. Catherine Morland, with all her enthusiasm and her mistakes, her modest tenderness and right feeling, and the fine instinct which runs through her simplicity, is the most captivating picture of a very young girl which fiction, perhaps, has ever furnished.
—from The Literary History of England (1882)
Goldwin Smith
Criticism is becoming an art of saying fine things, and there are really no fine things to be said about Jane Austen. There is no hidden meaning in her; no philosophy beneath the surface for profound scrutiny to bring to light; nothing calling in any way for elaborate interpretation.... Jane Austen’s characters typify nothing, for their doings and sayings are familiar and commonplace. Her genius is shown in making the familiar and commonplace intensely interesting and amusing.
—from Life of Jane Austen (1890)
The Dial
“Northanger Abbey” was sold to a Bath publisher for fifty dollars ; and having bought the MS., the Bath publisher was afraid to publish what seemed to him such unsalable ware, and, in the end, Miss Austen bought it back. For “Sense and Sensibility” she received less than a hundred and fifty pounds, which she nevertheless regarded as a “prodigious recompense!” It is true that certain distinguished critics spoke warmly of her, but, in general, she seemed to have as fair a chance of gently slipping down to oblivion as any writer of the da
y.
—December 1, 1892
Edmund Gosse
The one prose-writer of this period whose genius has proved absolutely perdurable, who holds no lower a place in her own class than is held in theirs by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott [is] that impeccable Jane Austen, whose fame becomes every day more inaccessible to the devastating forces of time and shifting fashion. It has long been seen, it was noted even by Macaulay, that the only writer with whom Jane Austen can fairly be compared is Shakespeare. It is obvious that she has nothing of his width of range or sublimity of imagination; she keeps herself to that two-inch square of ivory of which she spoke in her proud and simple way. But there is no other English writer who possesses so much of Shakespeare’s inevitability, or who produces such evidence of a like omniscience. Like Balzac, like Tourgenieff at his best, Jane Austen gives the reader an impression of knowing everything there was to know about her creations, of being incapable of error as to their acts, thoughts, or emotions. She presents an absolute illusion of reality; she exhibits an art so consummate that we mistake it for nature. She never mixes her own temperament with those of her characters, she never loses for a moment her perfect, serene control of them. Among the creators of the world, Jane Austen takes a place that is with the highest and that is purely her own.
—from Short History of Modern English Literature (1897)
Elbert Hubbard
No book published in Jane Austen’s lifetime bore her name on the title-page; she was never lionized by society; she was never two hundred miles from home; she died when forty-two years of age, and it was sixty years before a biography was attempted or asked for. She sleeps in the cathedral at Winchester, and not so very long ago a visitor, on asking the verger to see her grave, was conducted thither, and the verger asked, “Was she anybody in particular? so many folks ask where she’s buried, you know!” But this is changed now, for when the verger took me to her grave and we stood by that plain black marble slab, he spoke intelligently of her life and work. And many visitors now go to the cathedral only because it is the resting-place of Jane Austen, who lived a beautiful, helpful life and produced great art, yet knew it not.
