Review: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey – An Example of Genius (Spoilers)

Of all of Jane Austen’s books, I think Northanger Abbey gets the least recognition. If it hadn’t been for the fact that my copies of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility are both annotated, I probably never would’ve heard about it, much less read it. However, here we are. I read Northanger Abbey and while doing so, took an online course through Hillsdale College explaining it in more depth. So, here are my thoughts about Northanger Abbey and some stuff I learned from it.

If you read Northanger Abbey without knowing it’s background, it seems like a fairly normal Jane Austen novel until about the second half of the book where our main character, Catherine Morland is invited to go to the titular Northanger Abbey, the home of her new friends, the Tilneys. In that second half, you pretty quickly realize that Northanger Abbey is actually a comedy as Catherine, who’s obsessed with gothic literature, is disappointed to find that the abbey is nothing more extraordinary than a well-furnished house and does not actually hide anything remarkable and her friends’ father, General Tilney, is not actually a murderer. This leads her to go down a character arc in which she finds that you should not let fiction dictate your perception of real life, which helps her mature more as a character.

However, if you take the time to learn more about what you’re reading, you’ll find out that apparently the entire book is a comedy satirizing the gothic novels that had been popular when Jane Austen was growing up. Originally, Northanger Abbey was a story called Susan that Jane Austen started writing when she was in her teen years, but didn’t start seriously editing until she was 22. This is notable because it shows what a keen eye Austen had even as a young woman when it came to finding tropes and absurdities in some of the popular fiction that she consumed growing up. In the gothic novels, you usually had a virtuous young heroine, a brooding and mysterious hero, a tyrannical villain, mysterious castles and gothic architecture, and an over-emphasis on feelings, especially those of courage, fear, and terror, all of which (minus the brooding hero) are satirized throughout the plot of Northanger Abbey. Having read some gothic literature myself (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein, all of which will be covered this month), I hadn’t noticed this initially, but after completing my Hillsdale course on it, I’ve never been able to unsee it and its ingenious how Jane Austen was able to include it in one of her books.

Through the satirization of the gothic novel, we see the moral that Austen wants us to take away from the book, which is to laugh at what’s improbable and focus more on reality. Throughout the second half of Northanger Abbey, we see the most satire as Catherine, now being in an abbey (which were popular settings in gothic novels) makes mistake after mistake by letting her obsession of gothic literature paint her view of reality, only to be disappointed to find that it is not so and ashamed that she thought it was (Regency era main character syndrome). It also blinds her to the affection that her love interest, Henry Tilney, pays her. To the reader, it’s very clear that this guy, who’s the sense of reason, likes Catherine, but Catherine, expecting her love interest to be more like those in gothic novels, is totally oblivious to it until the end when Henry proposes to her. It shows us that real-life situations can sometimes be more interesting than what we imagine.

Until next time,

M.J.