Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

For the 2020 Back to the Classics Challenge (choose a 19th century classic) I decided to go with Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.  I wanted to read this novel because Jane Austen is always worth reading but also in Northanger Abbey, Austen pokes gentle fun at the world of gothic novels and since I would be hard pressed to name a writer less inclined to the gothic than Jane Austen I wanted to hear what she had to say on the subject.

And so when Northanger Abbey begins we are introduced to seventeen year old Catherine Morland.  Catherine is a good-hearted young woman who comes from a large and loving family.  She has led a sheltered life in the village of Fullerton and so when her neighbors, the Allens, suggest that Catherine accompany them on a six week visit to the city of Bath she jumps at the chance.

When Catherine arrives in Bath she is thrilled by everything she sees around her, the dances, the shops, the theater and shortly after her arrival she meets Isabella Thorpe and her brother John Thorpe.  The Thorpe's, unlike Catherine's family, are not wealthy but they have expensive tastes and so before long Isabella sets her sights on Catherine's brother James and John Thorpe tries to put the moves on young Catherine but she isn't interested.  Catherine falls instead for a young clergyman, Henry Tilney and the reader can see why.  Unlike John Thorpe who one critic has described as a blowhard, Henry Tilney, is intelligent, a good conversationalist and a gentleman.

Henry's family is also extremely wealthy, owners of the gothic style estate Northanger Abbey.  Henry and his sister Eleanor invite Catherine to spend a few weeks there and before long all of Catherine's gothic novel reading let's her imagination run wild.  She comes up with the idea that Henry and Eleanor's mother did not die from an illness years ago but rather that her husband, General Tilney, unbeknowst to his children has the poor woman locked away somewhere on the estate (shades of Jane Eyre).

Of course it isn't true and Catherine is horribly embarrassed when Henry figures out what she was thinking.  Henry doesn't hold it against Catherine.  More importantly he doesn't tell his father what Catherine was imagining..  As for Catherine she begins to have second thoughts about where her love for gothic novels has led her:

"Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland and the south of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented ... But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age.  Murders were not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb from every druggist". 

Although the above passage conveys Catherine's thoughts I sense she is also speaking for the author as well.  As Austen would later write to her niece Anna who was an aspiring writer "three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on".  Austen knew her world of Bath and it's environs and wrote about it beautifully but having now read three novels by Jane Austen I can't help wishing she would have taken a few more chances.

I enjoyed Northanger Abbey.  It's not her best book though possibly because it was the earliest of her six classic novels to be completed in 1803.  As for how things end with Henry and Catherine I don't think I'm giving away spoilers in an Austen novel when I say that of course it ends in wedding bells.