IN A NUTSHELL
This was a fun read, with a remarkably modern feel to it. It managed to be engaging, funny and sometimes dramatic while satirising Gothic Romances and their effects on impressionable teenage minds and highlighting the vulnerability of young women in a world run by predatory, self-regarding men. 

Jane Austen completed ‘Northanger Abbey‘ in 1799, when she was twenty-four years old. To me, it read like an exuberantly playful piece, written with wit and skill by someone very confident both of her abilities and of her opinions.’Northanger Abbey’ is many things, but, above all, it is fun. 

Jane Austen’s authorial voice is so strong in the novel that I kept imagining it as a movie voice-over. Jane Austen speaks directly to her readers, not as one of her characters but as the author who created them, and invites them to consider: the ridiculous expectations placed upon heroines in Gothic Romances; the gap between the romantic ideal and the reality of a six-week-long visit to Bath to take part in society; the acceptance by sophisitcated people that what is said and what is meant need have very little in common; and the unpleasant ways in which men think about women.

Catherine Moreland, a seventeen-year-old girl whose experience of the world has hitherto been bounded primarily by her interactions with her loving parents and her nine younger siblings, is the perfect candidate for the role of Innocent Abroad. Jane Austen adds to her innocence and inexperience a tendency to hope to discover in the real world all the things she finds most thrilling in the Gothic Romances that have colonised her imagination. 

Dropping Catherine into Bath society, unescorted except for a well-meaning but hapless neighbour, was bound to bring trouble. Bath, as Jane Austen knew it, was a place where those who could afford it went to do things that they could not do at home and would not want to be seen to be doing in London. This was the eighteenth-century version of a trip to Las Vegas. 

TThe two things that I enjoyed most about the scenes in Bath were how well Jane Austen captured the intoxication that two young women forming a friendship in partyland can feel for each other, and the dialogue between Catherine and John Thorpe and Catherine and Henry Tilney.

I loved the scene where Catherine meets John Thorpe, Isabella Thorpe’s brother and Catherine’s brother’s friend. It felt remarkably modern. John is a bore, obsessed with his own affairs and confident in both his opinions and his own worth. Hearing him engage Catherine in a one-sided, self-aggrandising conversation about how wonderful his gig is. He reminded me of those young men who talk endlessly about how wonderful their cars are.

The dialogue in the scene where Tilney first dances with Catherine could be from a modern RomCom. He is charming and witty. He engages here in a game that makes fun of the small talk expected on a first meeting and uses the game to build a level of intimacy and common feeling.

Jane Austen then moves the action to the Tilneys’ home, Northanger Abbey, placing Catherine in an environment that she will perceive primarily through the filters fed to her imagination by the Gothic novels that she reads so voraciously. Much humout follows as reality constantly refuses to align with Catherine’s expectations. I admired how Jane Austen used this to amuse the reader, debunk Gothic novels and establish Catherine as impressionable but good-hearted.

Another thing that felt very modern about the book was the late plot twist. Just when I was sure that Catherine had put her delusions behind her and was navigating her way towards a Happily Ever After ending, she is finally placed in real peril and by the very man whom her fantasies had demonised.

The ending is cute and satisfying. Jane Austen still uses her authorial voice to insert some practical reality into all the happiness and bliss, and bids farewell to the reader with a playful last line. 

BUDDY READ NOTES
As this was a Buddy Read, I created the Master Post below to share my thoughts on each chapter of ‘Northanger Abbey’ as I read it. I’ll added the most recent chapter read to the top of the post, so the chapters appear in reverse order.

Chapters 30 and 31: In which Catherine gets her HEA ending but not in the usual way of Romances

I’m not going to spoil the ending by giving a blow by blow aocount of these chapters except to say that Henry behaves well, Catherine is not foolish and the General’s wrath is explained but not excused.

Jane Austen unfurled the plot at a perfectly controlled pace, demostrating good humour and granting her characters happiness. She also took a couple of final swipes at the gaps between Gothic Romances and the realities of life for English gentlefolk.

Two things made me smile. The first was Jaen Austen’s extremely unromantic decription of Henry’s love for Catherine. She wrote:

“for, though Henry was now sincerely attached to her, though he felt and delighted in all the excellencies of her character and truly loved her society, I must confess that 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. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own.”

The second was the mischievious way in which she ended the book. She grants Catherine happiness, despite the disapproval of General Tllney and ends with:

“I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.”

Chapters 28 and 29: in which our heroine is finally placed in real peril

What a wonderful twist, Just as I was preparing an unplifiting HEA ending, General Tilney inexplicably kicks Catherine out of the house, forcing her to travel alone by public post for twelve hours to reach her home. This was an extraordinary breach of hospitality, especially towards a single woman who is only seventeen years old.

The upside of the story was that Catherine managed the journey and was welcomed home by her large family, whose warmth and informatilty made the rigid regime of Northanger Abbey seem strange and unnatural.

I loved encountering a real crisis, especially so late in the book, and seeig Catherine deal with it without falling apart.

I also liked that I had no idea why the General had thrown Catherine out.

Chapters 25 to 27: in which our heroine is pleased to find she is still welcomed by the Tilney’s and is shocked to learn of Isabella’s inconstancy.

These chapters could have been subtitled: ‘Catherine starts to grow up’. When Henry continues and his sister continue to be pleasant to her, Catherine resolves in future to judge and act “with the greatest good sense.”

Austen takes a final jab at the Gothin novel by having Catherine reflect that:

“Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for.”

The next two chapters balance between building up a reasonable expectatin that Henry Tilney may propose to Catherine and showing Catherine, via the inconstency of Isabella’s committment to Catherine’s brother and her dalliance with Henry’s brother, that not everyone behaves honourably.

Chapter 24: in which our heroine demonises her host, cannot resist the lure of a forbidden door, searches for evidence of dark deeds and finds only her own deep embarrassment

This was one of the chapters that I enjoyed most. It’s beautifully done. It succeeds in the assumptions made in Gothic novels and in moving the plot and Catherine’s personal devlopment along., all while delivering exciting scenes.

In the first half, the evil that Catherine assumes that her host, General Tilney, has done festers in her mind, arousing both her fear and her determination to unmask him. Catherine is so certain in her belief and so stalwart in her resolve to enter the one door in the house that has been forbidden to her that she becomes, for a few pages, the heroine of a Gothic novel.

Then everything explodes. She is discovered by Henry Tilney and made to understand that her fears are not only groundless and absurdly un-English but are also deeply insulting to her host. By the end of the chapter, Catherine is no longer a heroine but rather a foolish woman whose fevered imaginings have led her so far away from reality that she has trespassed on the goodwill of people who have been kind to her.

Chapters 21-23: in which our heroine succeeds in frightening herself, recovers, reproves herself and then convinces herself she has uncovered an evil secret at the heart of the Abbey.

These chapters were fun. I loved watching Catherine, primed by Henry Tilney’s fabrications, getting herself worked up over the sinister nature of various objets: a chest that should have contained a body, not linen; old paper in a cabinet drawer that should have been a cry for help or a confession, not a laundry list; and a storm that should have been a sign of doom but wastn’t.

Once she’s recovered from surviving all these imagined threats, she convinces herself that her host, General Tilney, charming as he seems to be, is actually guilty of having killed or imprisoned his allegedly dead wife.

This fun thread is made more interesting by all the things that Catherine is not paying attention to. The General’s behaviour towards his children speaks of long-held grief. His behaviour towards Catherine speaks of courtship. Faced with this complex reality, Catherine’s obsession with fantasy seems childish.

Chapter 20: In which Henry Tilney demonstrates a talent for fashioning tales of Gothic horror.

This was the chapter that I’ve enjoyed most so far. The scene that stuck with me was when Henry Tilney was drivingCatherine through the countryside in his two-seater, open-topped curricle. She asks him questions about Northanger Abbey. Seeing that, in Catherine’s mind, it is a place of mystery and excitement, Henry Tilney spins her a tale of what her accommodations at the Abbey will be, that sets her firmly in the role of endangered Gothic heroine. It’s playful but beautifully done and pulls Catherine into a delightfully frightening fantasy. I was struck by how easily the gothic scenes Tilney created would fit into modern horror movies. It seems our plots haven’t changed much. It made me wonder if a modern-day reincarnation of Jane Austen might not have made movies like ‘Scream’.

Where times have changed are with regard to travel. The Tilney’s break their journey north at Petty France, a distance of twenty miles, albeit that half of that is up hill, and rest their horses for two hours. The coaching inns at Petty France date back to the sixteenth century. These days, Petit France is a halfhour drive from town. Now I understand why the little village flourished, back in the day, when stops like this were necessary.

Chapters 17 – 19: In which Catherine is finally invited to Northanger Abbey and is so excited that she misses Isabella’s hints at devious plans.

TThese three chapters might have been entitled Simplicity and Sophistication. In them, Catherine demonstrates her simplicity by her unaffected delight at being invited to Northanger Abbey, her romantic ideas about the Abbey itself and her complete lack of thought about what such an invitation signifies beyond a welcome expansion of friendship with Miss Tilney. Isobel demonstrates her sophistication by plotting ways to manipulate herself and her brother, John Thorpe, into what she believes to be profitable marriages, even though she is already engaged to Catherine’s brother. She makes arch references to her plans that Catherine, in her simplicity, fails to understand until it becomes clear to her that Thorpe believes that Catherine has given tacit consent that a proposal from him would be welcome. 

Catherine’s simplicity does not extend to being blind to the impropriety of Isabella Thorpe’s acceptanace of public attention from Captrain Tilney. When she raises her concerns with Henry Tilney, he demonstrates his own naivety by declaring:

“You have no doubt of the mutual attachment of your brother and your friend; depend upon it, therefore, that real jealousy never can exist between them; depend upon it that no disagreement between them can be of any duration. Their hearts are open to each other, as neither heart can be to you; they know exactly what is required and what can be borne; and you may be certain that one will never tease the other beyond what is known to be pleasant.”

At this point, I thought the book was going to move from gentle comedy into melodrama, as Isabella’s plans ensnared Catherine. I was saved from that, both by Catherine’s inability to perceive the threat and by her removal from Bath by the Tilneys.

I thought these chapters prefigured some of the themes that Austen would return to in later novels with a more serious intent. I was impressed by Austen’s dexterous use of dialogue to build both character and suspense.

Chapters 15 and 16: in which Catherine is the naive foil to Tilney’s humour and Isabella’s machinations, and Miss Austen delivers some very quotable lines on how men think of women.

Catherine is so naive, so trusting, and so eager to please that watching her navigate society is like watching a puppy wander into the road to play with traffic. I’m finding the teenage angst very believable (even though the term teenager wasn’t one Austen would have heard), but a little tedious. Still, at least the joys and anxieties Catherine experiences are all based on the realities of the manners of the day and her own inexperience rather than by the improbalbe star-crossed-lovers twists of fate beloved by Gothic novelists.

It’s Austen’s prose that keeps me reading. She doesn’t waste a word. Everything that is said has an agenda. Mostly, she leaves the reader to work the agenda out, expecting them to be less naive than Catherine. Occasionally, she uses the authorial voice to gift her readers with a perfectly turned phrase or two. This time I found myself highlighting her damning descriptions of what men expect of women Ispoilet alert – they don’t expect much). The first phrase that caught my eye was a comment that Catherine’s shame in her own ignorance about the topics of Tilney’s conversation was misplaced. She advises that:

“Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”

I love the bite of that last sentence.

Later, Austen comments on Catherine’s lack of understanding of what might make her attractive to men. She says that men are…

“…too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance. But Catherine did not know her own advantages — did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward. *

It seems to me that this line of thought might explain how Mr Bennet, in ‘Pride and Prejudice‘ chose his bride.

Chapters 8-14: in which there are many small misunderstandings and I find out what kind of person a rattle is.

I’ve realised that I can’t sustain the pace of commenting on each chapter individually. Partly that’s because it slows my reading too much, but mostly it’s because, now that the book is underway, the chapters continue with established themes and styles.

Chapters 8-14 are largely about a series of misunderstandings and frustrations that retard Catherine’s progress in establishing a relationship with the Tilneys. Three things stood out for me about these chapters: firstly they avoid the Gothic novel norm of amplifying the consquences of misunderstandings by refusing to talk about them; secondly, that although the content is trivial and even silly, the writing is pitch perfect; and thirdly, how well Austen shows the heightened trauma that even the smallest upset or perceived slight can have on a teenage mind anxious for approval. I can easily imagine these chapters being translated to texts and WhatsApp messages, and all the trauma associated with them. 

The silliness, while described with great accuracy, mostly had me rolling my eyes and waiting for the plot to move on. The one thing that caught my attention was the depiction of John Thorpe and the colloquial term that Jane Austen used to describe him. She called him a rattle. It’s a term that I think needs to be given currency again. I can think of many a politician and at least one President to whom it applies.

John Thorpe is a rattle (possibly the politest term I would use to describe him). Jane Austen demonstrates this by having him make two back-to-back, vehement, but contradictory assertions about the state of the carriage in which Catherine’s brother and Thorpe’s sister are riding. Jane Austen attributes Catherine’s confusion over Thorpe’s statements to ignorance of the propensities of a rattle. Here’s the text:

*Catherine listened with astonishment; she knew not how to reconcile two such very different accounts of the same thing; for she had not been brought up to understand the propensities of a rattle, nor to know to how many idle assertions and impudent falsehoods the excess of vanity will lead. Her own family were plain, matter-of-fact people who seldom aimed at wit of any kind; her father, at the utmost, being contented with a pun, and her mother with a proverb; they were not in the habit therefore of telling lies to increase their importance, or of asserting at one moment what they would contradict the next.”

Chapter 7: in which Catherine and Isabella have a chance meeting with each other’s brothers.

I loved the scene where Catherine meets John Thorpe, Isabella Thorpe’s brother and Catherine’s brother’s friend. It felt remarkably modern. John is a bore, obsessed with his own affairs and confident in both his opinions and his own worth. Hearing him engage Catherine in a one-sided, self-aggrandising conversation about how wonderful his gig is. he reminded me of those young men who talk endlessly about how wonderful their cars are. John doubled down on his bore status by revealing that he has not read ‘The Mystery of Udolfo‘ or ‘Camilla‘, a fact which does not impinge on his willingness to disparage them authoritatively.

It would seem that Catherine should dislike John (I certainly did), but Austen explains how Catherine comes to persuade herself that the opposite is true. John’s manner did not please Catherine but…

“…he was James’s friend and Isabella’s brother; and her judgment was further bought off by Isabella’s assuring her, when they withdrew to see the new hat, that John thought her the most charming girl in the world, and by John’s engaging her before they parted to dance with him that evening. Had she been older or vainer, such attacks might have done little; but, where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world, and of being so very early engaged as a partner; and the consequence was that, when the two Morlands, after sitting an hour with the Thorpes, set off to walk together to Mr. Allen’s, and James, as the door was closed on them, said, “Well, Catherine, how do you like my friend Thorpe?” instead of answering, as she probably would have done, had there been no friendship and no flattery in the case, “I do not like him at all,” she directly replied, “I like him very much; he seems very agreeable.”

I loved that “it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world.” line. It’s a reminder of how vulnerable the young and previously unadmired are.

Chapter 6: in which Catherine and Isabella declare their fascination with ‘The Mystery Of Udolfo’ and demonstrate how intoxicated they are by each other’s company.

This chapter was so sweet, it made my teeth ache but, as a picture of how intoxicated two teenage girls can become with one another’s company in the first few days of acquaintance, especially when one is knowing and dominant and the other is naive and adoring, it works perfectly. It seems to me that nothing much has changed in this regard in the past 200 years.

Chapter 5: in which our author derides those who look down on novels

It rains in Bath so the two young ladies retire to read novels. The rest of the chapter is spent with Austen lambasting those who claim to look down on novels.

She passionately avers that she, as the author….

“…will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers.”

Chapter 4: In which our heroine is finally introduced to an acquaintance in Bath

This could have been a charming chapter in which Catherine has the good fortune to strike up a new acquaintance with a young woman whom she admires and quickly develops an affection for. Except that, although that is what happened, it wasn’t charming.

Although the tone of the prose was carefully inoffensive, there was something almost cruel, certainly something unkind, in the humour. The observations were painfully accurate, high on insight and low on empathy.  

On the surface, Jane Austen is satirising the novels that spent many chapters relating mundane exchanges in a tediously detailed way.  It seemed to me that, beneath the surface, there was a disdain not just for polite small talk but for those who enage in it with enthusiasm. I found myself wondering how many hours the young Jane Austen had had to spend in polite conversation with people she was bored by, able to predict every word that was to be said while valuing none of them.

Jane Austen sees every small vanity, every act of wilful self-delusion, as the people around her construct the narratives of their day. I wonder how much self-control it must have taken for her to work through all the tedious steps necessary to establish a friendship?

Chapter 3: In which our heroine meets the charming Mr Tilney

The first meeting between our seventeen-year-old heroine and the twenty-five-year-old Mr Tilney could, with no editing of the dialogue at all, have been a classic scene in a modern RomCom. The dialogue sparkles. I think any modern script writer would be delighted with it. Tilney turns the answering of the inevitable questions put to a new acquaintance in Bath into a game that gains him an intimacy that the questions themselves would not normally have elicited. He builds on this by playfully telling Catherine what she should write about him in her journal.

Tilney perhaps pushes his charm too far when he engages Mrs Allen in an extended conversation on Muslin, so that…

Catherine feared, as she listened to their discourse, that he indulged himself a little too much with the foibles of others.

I wonder how often Jane Aiusten had been accused of the same thing.

Chapter 2: In which our heroine arrives in Bath

I live in Bath, so it was fun to read about Catherine’s entry into the city. I liked this description of Catherine’s excitement:

They arrived at Bath. Catherine was all eager delight — her eyes were here, there, everywhere, as they approached its fine and striking environs, and afterwards drove through those streets which conducted them to the hotel. She was come to be happy, and she felt happy already.

I think that last sentence sums up the approach of a lot of the tourists who come to Bath.

This being Bath, the next thing to be done was to go shopping and then to go to The Assembly Rooms to be seen and perhaps to dance. I liked how unglamorous The Assembly Rooms were. It was too crowded to get close to the dance floor and, as they knew no one, Mrs Allen and Miss Morland were doomed to wandering the rooms in silence and mostly unregarded. This is not all The Assembly Room Experience of romance novels.

I found the chapter amusing, but one description was so acerbic it verged on cruelty.

Mrs. Allen was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them. She had neither beauty, genius, accomplishment, nor manner. The air of a gentlewoman, a great deal of quiet, inactive good temper, and a trifling turn of mind were all that could account for her being the choice of a sensible, intelligent man like Mr. Allen.

Chapter 1: In which we meet our heroine and her family

Jane Austen’s tongue was clearly pushed deep into her cheek as she wrote this. Even without having read the Gothic Romances that she is satirising, I can feel the sting of this lampoon as she lists all the ways in which Catherine Morland lacks the attributes necessary to be “an heroine”.

{I love that “an”. I was taught that words starting with an H should be treated like words starting with a vowel and so got an “an” in front of them. Today, Grammerly wants me to “correct my article usage” and use “a” instead. I’m going to stick with the Jane Austen version.}

I like that Austen’s portrait of the ten-year-old Catherine does more than satirise the image of a gothic heroine, it draws a picture of a lively, active, not particularly gifted, young girl whose parents allow her the freedom to have a good time. The message I took from this was that if Catherine is a real girl, then all those gothic heroines are the unreal imaginings of authors with little inclination to introduce reality into their narratives.

Yet Catherine is fated to be the heroine of this story, and so things must change. It begins when Catherine’s perception of herself shifts. I love how Austen descibes the shift:

“At fifteen, appearances were mending; she began to curl her hair and long for balls; her complexion improved, her features were softened by plumpness and colour, her eyes gained more animation, and her figure more consequence. Her love of dirt gave way to an inclination for finery, and she grew clean as she grew smart; she had now the pleasure of sometimes hearing her father and mother remark on her personal improvement. “Catherine grows quite a good-looking girl — she is almost pretty today,” were words which caught her ears now and then; and how welcome were the sounds! To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.”

I loved that ‘…almost pretty today” and its joyous reception.

Sadly, Catherine’s evolution into an heroine is retarded by the lack of suitable men for her to fall in love with, so she spends two years living out of range of the male gaze.

I like the conspiratorial style in which this is written. Austen is speaking directly to the reader, confident of a shared perception of absurdity and appreciation of suble wit. Austen knows that the reader recognises that Catherine in on what the scriptwriters today are taught to think of as “The Hero’s Journey” and so says:

“But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.”

So when Catherine is invited to go to Bath with some neighbours, we know her Hero’s Journey has begun.

To me, this direct-to-camera style felt like a very modern approach, not something written in 1811. It’s the sort of thing I’d see in a smart modern comedy that expects the audience to understand all the genre references and applaud the many ways in which they are being made fun of. I found myself imagining Jane Austen writing a satirical story lampooning Star Wars and Star Trek.