In Praise of Jane Austen’s Least Beloved Novel
“Northanger Abbey” is the least beloved of Jane Austen’s six novels. It also appears frequently in university-level literature classes. These two things are related.
Completed largely in 1798 and 1799, when Austen was in her early twenties, “Northanger” was the first of Austen’s novels to be written but among the last to be published. Austen sold the manuscript in 1803, but the publisher never brought out copies of the book. Ultimately, “Northanger” didn’t appear until 1817, a few months after Austen’s death. Her brother published it along with “Persuasion,” her final novel. This history may suggest something about how unusual and uncategorizable “Northanger” is.
For one thing, it is very much a novel about novels, deriving much of its energy and humor from mocking the tropes of the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century—particularly the convention of endowing protagonists with extraordinary personal qualities and heartrending histories. “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine,” the book begins. Catherine was, we learn, a plain-looking child—“awkward figure, a sallow skin . . . dark lank hair”—and was neither an orphan nor mistreated by her parents. She was more mischievous than precocious in virtue or genius, for she “never could learn or understand anything before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid.” Austen allows that she improved—some—with age, such that, at the time the action of the book takes place, Catherine’s “heart was affectionate”; “her disposition cheerful and open, without conceit or affectation”; and her mind no more “ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is.” In other words, Catherine is a nice, ordinary middle-class English girl. Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that her adventures will be of a more realistic sort than those of earlier and more conventional heroines: many of Catherine’s difficulties are brought on by her own errors in judgment rather than by the villainous machinations of her enemies. “Northanger” is, like all of Austen’s novels, a domestic drama, not a whirlwind romance or a horror story of the sort that Catherine can’t get enough of.
Catherine’s love for books is one of her most striking qualities. The ones she prefers are “all story and no reflection,” from which “nothing like useful knowledge could be gained.” Austen wrote “Northanger” in reaction to the hugely popular and highly sensational gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and her imitators, books that dominated the circulating libraries of England in the late eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries. However, Austen’s broader critique of novelistic convention also applies to the much less potboilerish novels of such authors as Frances Burney and Samuel Richardson. Austen admired these writers, but she could likely see that the psychological sophistication of their depictions of human nature was tethered to overheated ideas about what makes a fit hero or heroine, as well as to melodramatic plotlines involving kidnapping schemes, sudden inheritances, unfeeling parents, and mustachioed libertines—the kinds of devices Austen herself would famously eschew.
“Northanger” consists of two plotlines. One is a bildungsroman/marriage plot (that is to say, the bildungsroman culminates, as it typically does for young women in nineteenth-century novels, with marriage, making the novel fall at once into both categories) about a naïve young woman from the country who ventures out into the wider world—in this case, the fashionable resort town of Bath—where she navigates new friendships and romantic entanglements. The other is what we may call, for lack of any other name, a reading plot, in which Catherine, under the influence of her cherished gothic novels, begins to suspect the people around her of being as capable of evil as the villains she has read about.
The reading plot comes to the fore only after Catherine has had sufficient time in Bath to have been invited to visit the familial home of the siblings Eleanor and Henry Tilney, friends she has made there. At the Tilneys’ house, the titular Northanger Abbey, Catherine’s imagination becomes inflamed by the house’s age and size, and by the fact that it was once a functioning abbey, with cloisters; all this puts her in mind of Radcliffe’s historical novels, particularly “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” of which Catherine is especially enamored. She begins to feel herself to be the heroine of such a book, and almost expects to find hidden passageways that lead to secret dungeons containing bloody daggers and crumbling manuscripts that detail the horrors which have taken place there. In this mind-set, Catherine continually misinterprets what she sees, imputing dark deeds to the house’s owner, her friends’ father, General Tilney, based on scant, almost nonexistent evidence.
In fact, General Tilney is, as the reader realizes long before Catherine does, conceited, vain, money-loving, overly concerned with good eating, and a bit tyrannical. But, as unattractive as he is as a character, he is not the gothic villain—capable of murdering or imprisoning women—that Catherine briefly suspects him to be. Catherine’s readiness to see him so negatively surely reflects both her dawning suspicion that he isn’t quite the nice man he pretends to be, when he is trying to court her favor, and the pernicious effects of gothic novels on her youthful imagination.
And yet, despite its somewhat broad satire of the effect of novel-reading on a mind like Catherine’s, “Northanger” is no churlish attack on the novel. It’s not even an attack on the gothic novel. It is, rather, a rebuttal to such critiques, albeit one so elegant, and so conversant in the various arguments against the novel and its readers, that its radicalness has often passed unnoticed.
As Austen well knew, there was a gendered component to the social perception of novels. Echoing the conventional wisdom of her day, even the novel-loving Catherine wonders whether reading novels is an essentially feminine, and therefore frivolous, pursuit. “But you never read novels, I dare say?” she says to Henry Tilney, her intelligent love interest. “Why not?” he asks. She replies, “Because they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books.” To her surprise, however, Henry, channelling Austen, tells her, “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” He even confesses to taking escapist pleasure in Radcliffe’s fiction: “ ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again.”
But Austen doesn’t leave the defense of the novel to a male character. In her capacity as narrator, Austen not only unleashes some of the most passionate, if sarcastically heightened, exegeses in praise of the novel ever to be tucked delicately into the pages of one but also takes aim at the kind of casual sexism that undergirds condescension toward the form. Her irritation with those who blithely assume that nonfiction is superior, because it deals in facts and hard subjects such as politics and history, is evident when she writes:
