Comments & Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

COMMENTS

Jane Austen

You are very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which might recommend me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe-Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

—from a letter to J. S. Clarke (April 1, 1816)

 

Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges

When I knew Jane Austen, I never suspected that she was an authoress; but my eyes told me she was fair and handsome, slight and elegant, but with cheeks a little too full. The last time I think that I saw her was at Ramsgate in 1803: perhaps she was then about twenty-seven years old. Even then I did not know she was addicted to literary composition.

—from his Autobiography (1834)

 

Margaret Oliphant

Northanger Abbey is once more on the higher level. Such a picture of delightful youth, simplicity, absurdity, and natural sweetness, it is scarcely possible to parallel. Catherine Morland, with all her enthusiasm and her mistakes, her modest tenderness and right feeling, and the fine instinct which runs through her simplicity, is the most captivating picture of a very young girl which fiction, perhaps, has ever furnished.

—from The Literary History of England (1882)

 

Goldwin Smith

Criticism is becoming an art of saying fine things, and there are really no fine things to be said about Jane Austen. There is no hidden meaning in her; no philosophy beneath the surface for profound scrutiny to bring to light; nothing calling in any way for elaborate interpretation.... Jane Austen’s characters typify nothing, for their doings and sayings are familiar and commonplace. Her genius is shown in making the familiar and commonplace intensely interesting and amusing.

—from Life of Jane Austen (1890)

 

The Dial

 

“Northanger Abbey” was sold to a Bath publisher for fifty dollars ; and having bought the MS., the Bath publisher was afraid to publish what seemed to him such unsalable ware, and, in the end, Miss Austen bought it back. For “Sense and Sensibility” she received less than a hundred and fifty pounds, which she nevertheless regarded as a “prodigious recompense!” It is true that certain distinguished critics spoke warmly of her, but, in general, she seemed to have as fair a chance of gently slipping down to oblivion as any writer of the day.

—December 1, 1892

Edmund Gosse

The one prose-writer of this period whose genius has proved absolutely perdurable, who holds no lower a place in her own class than is held in theirs by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott [is] that impeccable Jane Austen, whose fame becomes every day more inaccessible to the devastating forces of time and shifting fashion. It has long been seen, it was noted even by Macaulay, that the only writer with whom Jane Austen can fairly be compared is Shakespeare. It is obvious that she has nothing of his width of range or sublimity of imagination; she keeps herself to that two-inch square of ivory of which she spoke in her proud and simple way. But there is no other English writer who possesses so much of Shakespeare’s inevitability, or who produces such evidence of a like omniscience. Like Balzac, like Tourgenieff at his best, Jane Austen gives the reader an impression of knowing everything there was to know about her creations, of being incapable of error as to their acts, thoughts, or emotions. She presents an absolute illusion of reality; she exhibits an art so consummate that we mistake it for nature. She never mixes her own temperament with those of her characters, she never loses for a moment her perfect, serene control of them. Among the creators of the world, Jane Austen takes a place that is with the highest and that is purely her own.

—from Short History of Modern English Literature (1897)

 

Elbert Hubbard

No book published in Jane Austen’s lifetime bore her name on the title-page; she was never lionized by society; she was never two hundred miles from home; she died when forty-two years of age, and it was sixty years before a biography was attempted or asked for. She sleeps in the cathedral at Winchester, and not so very long ago a visitor, on asking the verger to see her grave, was conducted thither, and the verger asked, “Was she anybody in particular? so many folks ask where she’s buried, you know!” But this is changed now, for when the verger took me to her grave and we stood by that plain black marble slab, he spoke intelligently of her life and work. And many visitors now go to the cathedral only because it is the resting-place of Jane Austen, who lived a beautiful, helpful life and produced great art, yet knew it not.

—from Little Journeys to the Homes of Famous Women ( 1897)

 

William Lyon Phelps

Northanger Abbey bears the marks of youth. It is a burlesque, and has the virtues and defects of that species. As an example of what Jane thought of the Mysteries of Udolpho, and of the whole school of blood and thunder, it is highly important; it contains also many remarks on novels and novel-reading which are valuable as showing how Jane Austen regarded her art. But it is not equal to such a work as Mansfield Park; it lacks variety and subtlety. The narration of the heroine’s finding the washing-bill in the old Abbey is pure fun, youthful mirth, and the description of the face and figure of the young girl is no more nor less than satire on the popular heroines of the day. Historically, however, the book is of the deepest significance; for it marks a turning-point in the history of the English novel, and it tells us more of its author’s personal views than all the rest of her tales put together. It is more subjective; in the fifth chapter there is an almost passionate defence of the novel against its detractors, who regarded such writing as merely superficial and lacking in serious artistic purpose; while in the sixth chapter, Sir Charles Grandison is favourably compared with the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe and her ilk. Such a work, written in the very bloom of youth, is conclusive evidence of the self-conscious purpose of its author; it proves that she knew exactly what she wanted; that her purpose in art was definite, and unalterable. In Northanger Abbey she showed how novels ought not to be written; her other books are illustrations of what she conceived to be the true theory.

—from Essays on Books (1914)

 

G. K. Chesterton

Jane Austen was not inflamed or inspired or even moved to be a genius; she simply was a genius. Her fire, what there was of it, began with herself; like the fire of the first man who rubbed two dry sticks together. Some would say that they were very dry sticks which she rubbed together. It is certain that she by her own artistic talent made interesting what thousands of superficially similar people would have made dull. There was nothing in her circumstances, or even in her materials, that seems obviously meant for the making of such an artist. It might seem a very wild use of the wrong word to say that Jane Austen was elemental.

 

—from his preface to Austen’s Love and Freindship [sic]

and Other Early Works ( 1922 )

QUESTIONS

1. Is it possible to formulate what Catherine has learned by the end of the novel? Try to explain it in just a couple of sentences.

2. Is there any sign that any of the characters in Northanger Abbey feels sexual desire? Can Austen’s realism be considered complete without this aspect of human relationships?

3. There is more than one kind of humor. Mark Twain and Bill Cosby are both funny, but in different ways. Describe Jane Austen’s humor. Is it verbal, situational, cosmic? What are the occasions for her humor—social gaffs, misuse of words, stupidity, absurd desires, impropriety, misunderstanding, lack of self-knowledge? Is her humor meant to correct or chastise; does it have a higher purpose? Or is it just for our amusement?

4. What, besides money, is required for Jane Austen’s country gentry to survive? Could you survive in this milieu? Could any completely honest person?