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 day.
--December 1, 1892
Edmund Gosse
The one prose-writer of this period whose genius has proved absolutely perdurable, who holds no l
ower 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.
--from Little Journeys to the Homes of Famous Women ( 1897)
William Lyon Phelps
Northanger Abbey bears the marks of youth. It is a burlesque, and has the virtues and defects of that species. As an example of what Jane thought of the Mysteries of Udolpho, and of the whole school of blood and thunder, it is highly important; it contains also many remarks on novels and novel-reading which are valuable as showing how Jane Austen regarded her art. But it is not equal to such a work as Mansfield Park; it lacks variety and subtlety. The narration of the heroine's finding the washing-bill in the old Abbey is pure fun, youthful mirth, and the description of the face and figure of the young girl is no more nor less than satire on the popular heroines of the day. Historically, however, the book is of the deepest significance; for it marks a turning-point in the history of the English novel, and it tells us more of its author's personal views than all the rest of her tales put together. It is more subjective; in the fifth chapter there is an almost passionate defence of the novel against its detractors, who regarded such writing as merely superficial and lacking in serious artistic purpose; while in the sixth chapter, Sir Charles Grandison is favourably compared with the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe and her ilk. Such a work, written in the very bloom of youth, is conclusive evidence of the self-conscious purpose of its author; it proves that she knew exactly what she wanted; that her purpose in art was definite, and unalterable. In Northanger Abbey she showed how novels ought not to be written; her other books are illustrations of what she conceived to be the true theory.
--from Essays on Books (1914)
G. K. Chesterton
Jane Austen was not inflamed or inspired or even moved to be a genius; she simply was a genius. Her fire, what there was of it, began with herself; like the fire of the first man who rubbed two dry sticks together. Some would say that they were very dry sticks which she rubbed together. It is certain that she by her own artistic talent made interesting what thousands of superficially similar people would have made dull. There was nothing in her circumstances, or even in her materials, that seems obviously meant for the making of such an artist. It might seem a very wild use of the wrong word to say that Jane Austen was elemental.
--from his preface to Austen's Love and Freindship [sic]
and Other Early Works ( 1922 )
QUESTIONS
1. Is it possible to formulate what Catherine has learned by the end of the novel? Try to explain it in just a couple of sentences.
2. Is there any sign that any of the characters in Northanger Abbey feels sexual desire? Can Austen's realism be considered complete without this aspect of human relationships?
3. There is more than one kind of humor. Mark Twain and Bill Cosby are both funny, but in different ways. Describe Jane Austen's humor. Is it verbal, situational, cosmic? What are the occasions for her humor--social gaffs, misuse of words, stupidity, absurd desires, impropriety, misunderstanding, lack of self-knowledge? Is her humor meant to correct or chastise; does it have a higher purpose? Or is it just for our amusement?
4. What, besides money, is required for Jane Austen's country gentry to survive? Could you survive in this milieu? Could any completely honest person?
For Further Reading
BIOGRAPHIES
Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
CRITICISM
Bloom, Harold, ed. Jane Austen. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.
Burlin, Katrin Ristkok. " 'The Pen of the Contriver': The Four Fictions of Northanger Abbey." In Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, edited by John Halperin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Butler, Marylin. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
Byrde, Penelope. Jane Austen Fashion: Fashion and Needlework in the Works of Jane Austen. Ludlow, UK: Excellent Press, 1999.
Copeland, Edward, and McMaster, Juliet, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Dabundo, Laura, ed. Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, and Their Sisters. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000.
Doody, Margaret Anne, and Douglas Murray, eds. Catharine and Other Writings, by Jane Austen. With an introduction by Margaret Anne Doody. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Fergus, Jan S. Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice. London: Macmillan, 1983.
Le Faye, Deirdre. Jane Austen's Letters. Third edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
McMaster, Juliet and Bruce Stovel, eds. Jane Austen's Business: Her World and Her Profession. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.
McMaster, Juliet. Jane Austen the Novelist: Essays Past and Present. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press, 1996.
Miller, D. A. Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Powell, Violet Georgiana, Lady. A Jane Austen Compendium: The Six Major Novels. London: Heinemann, 1993.
Tanner, Tony. Jane Austen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Waldron, Mary. Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Wright, Andrew H. Jane Austen's Novels: A Study in Structure. London: Chatto and Windus, 1953.
a Private fortune or source of income.
b Benefices; church offices that pay revenue.
c More commonly spelled "spinet"; a harpsichord or small piano.
d Giving birth and recovering.
e An early version of the modern game.
f Child under his protection or custody.
g Member of the gentry below a knight and above a gentleman; the principal landowner in a district.
h Imaginary village in a real county in southern England.
i City in Somerset, in southwestern England on the River Avon; a spa town famous since Roman times for its medicinal waters.
j Tendency toward gout, whose main symptom is painful inflammation in the joints. The waters at Bath were thought to relieve the condition.
k English coins issued from 1663 to 1813; after 1717 their value was fixed at 21 shillings (one pound plus one shilling).
l Or Great Pulteney Street, a major thoroughfare running west to Pulteney Bridge. From there, Catherine Morland could easily reach virtually any important place in Bath.
m Reputation. ++ Well dressed.
n Or Upper Assembly Rooms; on Alfred Street, where visitors to Bath went to see and be seen. Catherine Morland would cross Pulteney Bridge and turn right or north to reach the Upper Rooms.
o Free of criticism.
p That is, tourists packed the city.
q At the far end, where tiers of benches overlook the dance floor.
r Plumes in hats.
s Cotton fabric.
t Elegant building that includes both facilities for social gatherings and the spa fountain, where visitors acquire the medicinal water.
u Or Lower Assembly Rooms; near Terrace Walk, another gathering place. Catherine Morland would cross Pulteney Bridge and turn left or south to reach the Lower Rooms.