The New Yorker:

Part marriage plot, part novel about novels, “Northanger Abbey” is Austen’s strangest—and perhaps most underappreciated—work.

By Adelle Waldman

“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.

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