Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey is both a perfectly aimed literary parody and a withering satire of the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century. But most of all, it is the story of the initiation into life of its naïve but sweetly appealing heroine, Catherine Morland, a willing victim of the contemporary craze for Gothic literature who is determined to see herself as the heroine of a dark and thrilling romance. When Catherine is invited to Northanger Abbey, the grand though forbidding ancestral seat of her suitor, Henry Tilney, she finds herself embroiled in a real drama of misapprehension, mistreatment, and mortification, until common sense and humor—and a crucial clarification of Catherine’s financial status—puts all to right. Written in 1798 but not published until after Austen’s death in 1817, Northanger Abbey is characteristically clearheaded and strong, and infinitely subtle in its comedy.
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What Hacker News says
- PS: As a literary stunt and challenge, the question, how can we do an entertaining and involving novel with an entirely inert heroine and protagonist?, isn't that dissimilar from Umberto Eco's chosen challenge, how can we do a who-done-it where the book is the murderer? (as seen in the Name of the Rose.) And Jane Austen masters the seemingly impossible quite impressively.
It's quite remarkable how postmodern Jane Austen's novels already are. See also Northanger Abbey, where she regularly breaks the 4th wall for a meta-discourse on literature and genres, just to involve the reader again and again, as if she had never ripped the veil – which isn't necessarily black, BTW.
(In this context, it may be also notable how Fanny Price’s apparently keen social observations are really a mirror of the rigorous views and forms conveyed in moral books as characterized by Austen and put up as a foil and antipode to the genre of novels in this meta-discourse, and laughed at in other novels, like in the characters of Mr. Collins and Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. If not for other reasons, Fanny Price is an anti-heroine, just for her anti-novel-ness.)
- In Northanger Abbey we get an explicit reference to one of those books, The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, which started the entire Gothic novel craze. Comparing the two is quite informative: Where Radcliffe describes the basic character traits over a page or two, followed by another page how fortunately this added up with the specific situation in life, Austen gives us a one-sentence-or-less description of the social characteristics of a character, maybe followed by a short remark on how this character deviated from what was to be expected from this. And, where Radcliffe's characters break into tears to assert their humanity, over and over again (something that can be still observed in Bram Stoker's Dracula, but thankfully much rarer), Austen's characters just chase their follies, which are more often than not a class marker. (If you thought modern times were car-crazy, just look at those gigs!)
In this sense, where characters are established by just dropping social position and economic status as sort of a blueprint, Jane Austen is a surprisingly materialist author. To paraphrase a well known quote, she turned Radcliffe from the head to the feet. ;-)
- "Before his death in 1849 at age 40, Poe largely created the modern short story, while also inventing or perfecting half the genres represented on the bestseller list, including the mystery ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Gold-Bug"), science fiction ("The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion"), psychological suspense ("The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Cask of Amontillado") and, of course, gothic horror ("The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," the incomparable "Ligeia")."
I love Poe, but whether he can be credited with inventing these genres is highly debatable.
On the origin of the mystery tale, Poe published "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841, and "The Gold-Bug" in 1843.
In 1819 ETA Hoffmann wrote "Mademoiselle de Scuderi".
To my knowledge, it was Hoffmann's work, written decades before Poe's, that was the prototypical detective story (featuring a female detective even!).
On the origin of the Gothic, Poe published "The Fall of the House of Usher" in 1839, "The Masque of the Red Death" in 1842, and "Ligeia" in 1838.
By then, the Gothic genre was well under way, with Horace Walpole having published the classic The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Ann Radclife (the mother of the Gothic) had published The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794 and it was already parodied by Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey in 1817, long before Poe even started writing any of his Gothic fiction.
Science fiction has a very long history, and depending on how you define it could go back at least to the 2nd Century AD, with Lucian's A True Story (featuring travel to outer space, encounters with aliens, and interplanetary warfare), but if you didn't accept that as "true science fiction" there are plenty of other candidates which predate Poe, such as parts of the Arabian Nights (well over a thousand years old by the time Poe started writing), Gulliver's Travels (1726), Voltaire's Micromegas (1752), and of course Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).
- > Since the first published citation to Emma in 1978, Jane Austen’s works have been invoked 27 times in American legal decisions, including references to Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and, of course, Pride and Prejudice.
Please add (<=27 judges) to the title.
The article was neat, but the headline is clickbait.
- I don't think Northanger Abbey is a good recommendation for getting into Jane Austen. Not because it's bad, but because about halfway through it takes a David Lodge-style detour into gothic pastiche. Indeed the entire novel is a love letter to the gothic novel (many of the classic tropes occur, but transported to a specifically English context). Great book, but definitely falls on the literary side of the fence along with Emma.
The best introduction, in my opinion, is Pride and Prejudice. Reading it as a purely romantic novel is, in my opinion, a mistake. It has a huge amount to say about class (which is pretty common for Austen) and is paced like a thriller.
The thing with Austen is that the context matters: the Bennet sisters are looking at penury. The mother is determined to avoid it, but going about it the wrong way, and the father is just plain disengaged.
There's also a very strong counter-culture thread through all the books where wisdom and gentility are harder to find the further up the social hierarchy you go. The individuals that everyone admires are _awful_.
Oh yes, and when reading Mansfield Park, bear in mind that "the spice trade" was a contemporary euphemism for slavery.
