A Second Look into Northanger Abbey

References in parentheses are to chapters; those in brackets are endnotes.


This is, I believe, an authentic second look, though the first would have contained little to detain the reader.  In the front of my Dolphin paperback, at the age of sixteen, I scrawled “key to understanding the text – page 110” where the underlined passage has Isabella declaring, “But this is idle talking!”  I recall in that period mentioning Austen as an author whose value I could better recognize than appreciate. This callow judgment was doubtless due to simple gender identification – her heroines tend to be young ladies who, when not discussing their frocks or their hair, consider marriage candidates, often favoring those blessed with a becoming measure of wealth.  This time round I aspire to a considerably more specific (if not particularly novel) evaluation which turns out to be considerably more positive as well.  At the time of that first reading I was not far from the age of Catherine Morland and likely had more in common with her than I suspected.


     Northanger Abbey is a delight, brief, with a frothy little plot featuring an impossibly ingenuous ingénue and a somewhat wiser but no less unspoiled male lead. It scintillates with wit and the elaborate circumlocutions that ornamented polite conversations of the time. If the narrative movement is slow and a bit repetitive during the Bath chapters and then too swiftly finds a felicitous denouement in the end, the reader is too charmed by the characters and amused by the artificiality of their language to complain.

     The characters’ personalities are expressed verbally not only in what say, but notably in their taste in fiction. Indeed, the simplest way to characterize Austen’s Northanger Abbey is as a satire on the fashion for Gothic novels and so it is. Yet the trajectory of plot has only a limited link to this theme. In the tale of Catherine’s coming of age, her passing from girl to wife, her literary taste forms only a part, and in the depiction of a hypocritical and often selfish beau monde, novel-reading is a venial charge. Far from betraying a lack of unity – which might be unsurprising in a first novel – the reading of books is skillfully linked in the narrative to the reading of everyday life. Decoding the treatment of experience in works of art turns out to be little different from processing one’s sense impressions, themselves signs of reality. Discernment based on experience is critical to both.

     Austen does not merely satirize the fashion for Gothic novels. She satirizes as well her own novelistic practices in ways that often suggest an ironic use of her own narrative voice, thus generating a series of points of view: that of the popular novelist, that of the typical reader, that of her own persona, and that that is implied to be her own. She had described Catherine at the outset as an unlikely heroine and later, in one of her recurrent self-reflective passages (V) she points to one point of difference between the novelistic heroine and their representative in the young Miss Morland. With a gay play of wit, she notes in her novel with a novel-reading heroine, that people in novels do not read novels.

     Throughout the book, sometimes within a single paragraph or sentence, the view of fiction oscillates, often to the point of ambiguity. In the first place, novels must surely be good because, after all, the writer is writing and the reader reading a novel. After both actively assenting to the value of stories in practice, it would be odd if they were to condemn them in theory.

     Yet the very first sentence problematizes the appreciation of novels. By indicating that Catherine is far from a conventional heroine, Austen implies a conservable gap between fiction and reality. The implication is that Catherine is a more or less ordinary, if exemplary, specimen of (seventeen-year-old) womanhood and that the Gothic authors are spinners of fantasies. The implausibility of the plots dreamed up by Mrs. Radcliffe and others is indeed the source of much of the comedy of Northanger Abbey.

     Yet it is true that Austen repeatedly ridicules the melodramatic conventions of the Gothic novel. She is most ridiculous when imagining melodramatic goings-on in the abbey. Her investigation of the bureau in her room which turns out to contain nothing more than a batch of old laundry receipts causes her to scold herself for her imagination, yet she goes on to look into Mrs. Tilney’s old room, thinking her perhaps dead or imprisoned only to be embarrassed by her discovery by Henry who guesses at her speculations.

     Why then do people read novels, is they care so misleading about lived experience? For the Gothic vogue, Austen is clear enough. Isabella as a woman of fashion is up on all the novels, and when she provides her new friend with a reading list, Catherine asks, “Are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?” (VI) The sensation, the “horridness,” of the plots with their mysterious un-English settings and their supernatural accoutrements, heightened by suspense, is their reason for being.

     The thrill of crime fiction, which flourishes yet today, is the basis for a bit of comic business when Catherine “solemnly” “something very shocking will soon come out in England.” (XIV) “Startled,” Eleanor Tilney asks for details and is not reassured when Catherine assures her that the affair “will be more horrible than anything we have met with yet,” “uncommonly dreadful,” with “murder and everything of the kind.” It turns out she is talking of “a new publication . . . in three duodecimo volumes.”

     A further defense of fiction may be inferred from its partisans. Henry Tilney, who is charming to a fault, surprises Catherine by identifying himself as a novel reader and declaring, that anyone not susceptible to the pleasure in a good novel must be “intolerably stupid.” (XIV) as evidenced he recalls reading Udolpho aloud with his sister and plunging to the end while she wrote a note. He is impelled by irresistible desire. “I am proud when I reflect on it, and I think it must establish me in your good opinion.” He suggests here that familiarity with literature is likely to make a person more moral and that a man of sensibility, receptive to the play of emotions offered by fiction, is likely to be sympathetic, altruistic, and indeed moral in lived experience.

     From his first introduction James Thorpe exhibits fatuous, self-interested behavior. When Catherine asks him if he has read Udolpho, he replies, “Oh, Lord! not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.” This does not preclude his saying he might go in for an “amusing” story, something with “fun and nature.” Then in a turn of incidental wit, Austen has him condemn Burney’s Camilla as “the horridest nonsense.”) (VII) [2] In a reversal of Henry’s emotional sensibility, James Thorpe is incapable of imagining the feeling s of another person either on the page or across the room.

     The case of General Tilney illuminates Austen’s model for novel-reading that enriches rather than misleads the reader’s view of the world. Though Catherine’s suspicions that the general has killed or imprisoned his wife are fantasies, grounded in melodramatic fiction, he turns out to be a monster of greed and rudeness in fact. The story-teller tells the truth, but indirectly, by implication, using refraction. Just as Catherine had taken everyone at their word, unable to conceive of mendacious or wicked people, she likewise took her the narratives of Mrs. Radcliffe and others literally. When she enters a genuine abbey, its renovations do not correspond to her expectations, but its halls turn out to hold the potential for drama and romance all the same.

     Not only can literary texts benefit from such interpretation. Many experiences of everyday life require analogous decoding, even if here the “everyday life” is itself contained on a page of a novel, suggesting an infinite regression of symbolic forms. Signs seem always to refer to other signs and the observer must manage their implications in a consistently provisional way. Thus Henry amuses himself by playing the pedagogue with Catherine (XIV), insisting on the older meaning for the word “nice.” Eleanor and the reader know that he only seems to be making a philological distinction; in reality he is flirting with Catherine. [1] Similarly, when they are about to arrive at Northanger Abbey and Henry spins out a playful Gothic pastiche description of his home, his goal is not to provide information about the abbey’s real characteristics, but rather to tease the ingenuous Miss Morland. (XX)

     These experiences, compounded with what she has seen in the public rooms of Bath to make her doubt Isabella’s sincerity and good nature, including her dalliance with Captain Tilney , lead Catherine to a more nuanced view of both spoken and written “truth.” What people say may not be literally true, yet it is not random either, but rather deeply meaningful in novels and life alike. Such correspondences between signifier and signified typify all story from the myth of Oedipus to one’s memory of this morning’s breakfast.

     All experiences, however, are not equally meaningful. For Austen novels situated between the dryasdust pedantry of a history of England (which lacks any entertainment value) and the “coarse” popular journalism of the Spectator (which lacks meaning). Ideally in fiction one may find “work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” (V)

     This stirring encomium for literature was doubtless based on the traditional Horatian formula according to which poetry or imaginative literature in general is expected to teach and delight. The thrills of horror and suspense are what attract the reader to the deeper knowledge of human nature that comes through a wide experience either in books or in drawing rooms. Neither heroines from books nor acquaintances from the Pump Room are to be taken at face value. Lacking this refracted reading, both literature and last night’s chitchat are indeed nothing but “idle talking.”



1. Similarly, in X Henry playfully constructs an analogy between dance partners and marriage partners. Considering Catherine’s naiveté he seems to be entertaining primarily himself. Henry, though uniformly civil, hardly exhibits the passion often expected of a male lead. His marriage seems occasioned more than anything by his wish to redeem his father’s rudeness. If there is never anything to dislike about him, he seems also to have little romantic enthusiasm.

2. The word “horrid” seems to have been enjoying a vogue at the time. See, for instance Isabella’s exclaiming “horrid!” in X.