An Inspiration for Northanger Abbey

”Those ingenious moderns ... have swallowed all the solemnities of the Mysteries of Udolpho, and never even seen the joke of Northanger Abbey.“

—G. K. CHESTERTON

 

 

 

Of Jane Austen’s six major novels, Northanger Abbey was the first written (begun around 1798) but the last published (in a combined edition with Persuasion in 1818). At the time she wrote Northanger Abbey, a period spanning her childhood and maturity, Austen was evolving past the spoofing style of her juvenilia and becoming the author of comedies of manners, and the novel contains elements of both her youthful parodies and her refined observation of societal mores.

The first half of Northanger Abbey resembles the mature works, while the second half parodies gothic conventions, making it consistent with her early writings, which were mostly humorous imitations. The gothic novel, usually set in a castle, tends toward the sensational and melodramatic. It often pits a helpless and, frequently, orphaned young woman against a cunning, predatory male, and typically utilizes the supernatural, the grotesque, and the bizarre to bring sanity and rationality to their breaking points.

The second volume of Northanger Abbey was written to caricature The Mysteries of Udolpho ( 1794) , by Ann Radcliffe, one of the most popular novels of its day. Radcliffe’s work is the prototypical gothic novel, along with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), which inaugurated the genre. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, the evil Count Montoni imprisons Emily St. Aubert in his dark mountain castle after the death of her parents. Rotting corpses, unexplained noises, and musky cellars terrorize Emily until she escapes on the arm of the noble Valencourt. Radcliffe also inspired Matthew Gregory Lewis to write The Monk ( 1796) , which Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland mentions reading; Lewis’s novel, very popular in its day, is an outlandish tale of an abbot drawn into a world of incest, murder, and torture. Radcliffe influenced many other writers, including Sir Walter Scott, the Marquis de Sade, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe.

In the second half of Northanger Abbey, Catherine becomes engrossed in The Mysteries of Udolpho. Austen critiques the fright ening fantasies such novels put into the minds of readers by parodying the sensational imagination gone awry. On the trip from Bath to Northanger Abbey, in chapter XX, Tilney humorously concocts a fearful story about the ancient terrors that will befall Catherine at the decrepit castle. He warns that she will encounter a “violent storm.... a dagger ... some instrument of torture” (p. 149) and, horror of horrors, the “memoirs of the wretched Matilda” (p. 150). When the party finally arrives at Northanger Abbey, it turns out to be rather ordinary—modern even, with the gothic stained-glass windows removed. When Catherine opens the mysterious cabinet, Austen toys with the gothic convention of the anticipation of mishap, but Catherine’s expectations of unnamed horrors are deflated; she finds only laundry bills.

In chapter VI (p. 34), Isabella lists for Catherine her favorite gothic novels, a group of titles that has become known as the Northanger Canon: Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian; Or, the Confessional of the Black Penitents ( 1797) ; The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and Mysterious Warnings (1796), by Eliza Parsons; Clermont: A Tale (1798), by Regina Maria Roche; The Necromancer; Or, the Tale of the Black Forest: Founded on Facts (1794), by Lawrence Flammenberg; The Midnight Bell: A German Story Founded on Incidents in Real Life (1798), by Francis Lathom; The Orphan of the Rhine: A Romance 1798) , by Eleanor Sleath; and Horrid Mysteries: A Story from the German of the Marquis of Grosse (1796) , by Carl Grosse.

Northanger Abbey was not Austen’s first parody. On the contrary, it was her final such work. While Austen’s mature novels are noted for their subtle social commentary and lack of political opinions, her juvenilia veers more toward exaggeration and spoof. Love and Freindship (sic), written in 1790 when Austen was fifteen, caricatures the cartoonish sentimental novel, a genre popular in the mid-eighteenth century that was closely related to the gothic novel. Another early Austen work, The History of England: From the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st, lampoons the history books she read as a child. Composed in 1791 by a “partial, prejudiced, and ignorant historian,” it contained the warning: “N.B. There will be very few dates in this history.”