Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey Review

Jane Austen wrote the first draft of Northanger Abbey when she was around twenty-two, and the novel has the energy of a writer who has just discovered exactly what she can do. Published posthumously in 1817, the same year as Persuasion, it reads nothing like its companion volume — where Persuasion is autumnal and emotionally precise, Northanger Abbey is a romp, a comedy, a deliberate provocation aimed at the gothic novels that were flooding the market in the 1790s.

Catherine Morland is Austen’s most cheerfully unheroine-like heroine. She is neither beautiful nor accomplished nor particularly clever. What she is, is genuinely good — open, curious, and free of vanity — and Austen uses her transparent goodness as a prism through which to refract the absurdities of everyone around her. At Bath, Catherine navigates the social marketplace with engaging clumsiness. At Northanger Abbey itself, her gothic-addled imagination begins to see sinister plots behind every closed door — until Henry Tilney, her love interest and the novel’s most self-conscious creation, gently dismantles her fantasies.

The famous Chapter Five defence of novels — “the greatest powers of the mind are displayed” in fiction — is Austen writing a manifesto for her own art in the middle of a joke at her art’s expense. It is a remarkable tonal trick, and it sets up the novel’s central moral argument: reading is dangerous only when it prevents you from seeing people clearly. Catherine’s cure is not to stop reading but to read better.

The love story is lighter than in Austen’s mature novels, but no less true. Henry Tilney’s affection grows from amusement into genuine admiration, and Austen is honest enough to admit that being loved for your good qualities is a perfectly sound reason to love back.

The Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Marilyn Butler.

Composition and Publication History

Northanger Abbey was the first of Austen’s novels to reach completed form, written around 1798–1799 under the title “Susan.” Her father George Austen submitted it to the London publisher Crosby and Company in 1803, who purchased the copyright for £10 but never published it — a frustrating dormancy that lasted until 1816, when Austen’s brother Henry bought the rights back for the same £10. Austen died in July 1817 before seeing the novel published; it appeared posthumously in December 1817 (dated 1818), paired with Persuasion in a four-volume set, with a biographical note by Henry Austen identifying “Jane Austen” as the author for the first time. The other five novels had been published anonymously.

The Parody

The novel’s target is the Gothic fiction popular in the late 18th century, particularly Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which the heroine Catherine Morland reads obsessively before her visit to Northanger Abbey. Austen plays the premise for comedy: Catherine, primed by Gothic novels to expect supernatural horrors in every old building, finds instead that the Abbey is comfortable and well-maintained, and that the sinister General Tilney’s behaviour, which she interprets through Gothic conventions, has a far more mundane explanation in financial calculation and social snobbery.

The parody is affectionate rather than contemptuous. Austen was herself a reader of Gothic fiction, and the novel’s point is not that the genre is worthless but that it can become a substitute for direct perception — that reading novels which tell you what to feel can prevent you from learning to feel for yourself. Catherine’s education is not to stop reading but to learn the difference between narrative convention and reality.

The Love Story

Henry Tilney is the most intellectually engaging of Austen’s heroes, distinguished by his wit and his willingness to explain rather than merely attract. His teasing of Catherine is never cruel, and his growth from amusement to genuine admiration tracks more honestly than many romantic plots in Austen’s mature work. The novel ends with Austen’s most explicit statement of what her novels are: “a 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.”

This defence of the novel form — against the cultural contempt for fiction that still existed in 1818 — is one of the earliest and most elegant arguments for literary fiction’s seriousness, embedded in a work that never loses its lightness.

Austen’s Defence of the Novel

The famous passage in which Austen defends the novel form — “a 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” — is embedded in Northanger Abbey as a meta-commentary on Catherine Morland’s reading habits. Austen was arguing against the cultural contempt for fiction that still existed in 1818, and the defence is all the more persuasive for being made inside a novel, demonstrating its own claim. The passage is among the earliest formal defences of literary fiction’s seriousness in the English tradition.

The 2007 ITV adaptation, with Felicity Jones as Catherine and JJ Feild as Henry Tilney, was broadcast as part of the ITV Jane Austen Season and received positive reviews for its fidelity to the novel’s Gothic parody elements and for Feild’s performance as the most explicitly funny of Austen’s heroes.