Northanger Abbey is not the most popular of Austen’s novels. It is largely maligned because of its central character, Catherine Morland, who lacks the wit and charm of Austen’s other heroines. She isn’t bright, wise, or particularly accurate in her perceptions, which has led many people to consider Northanger Abbey to be just as bright, wise, and perceptive as its main character. I, however, feel that Catherine and Northanger Abbey aren’t being judged fairly.

Northanger Abbey is a commentary on Bath society of the early 19th Century and the Gothic novel, a satiric novel full of references and meta-humor. I recently reread Northanger Abbey while preparing to write this post, and was again struck by its ambition and literary scope. I think that itis still highly applicable to our own popular culture, general and literary, and it deserves more attention for its insights on the novel form especially. It is essential reading, not just for Austen aficionados, but for anyone interested in dissecting the novel as a literary form.

I’d like to begin by dwelling on Catherine. Austen opens the novel with the line, “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine” (15). This is both because Catherine had a happy, uneventful childhood, and because she is not especially beautiful, intelligent, or perceptive. Austen is comparing Catherine to a typical novel’s heroine, which is usually an extraordinary woman with an extraordinary life. While there are novels such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha that follow an “ordinary” woman’s “ordinary” life, even these are told with special narrative attention to the sublime moments of the everyday, to the strange contours of the ordinary.

But Catherine, because of her youth and naivety, discovers wonder in the world around her herself, based around its supposed similarity to the Gothic novels she adores. Admittedly, this is largely Austen parodying “the language of wonder”, in describing Bath and Northanger Abbey through Catherine’s eyes (Duquette, 4). But this moves beyond mere mockery. Catherine’s capacity for wonder renders her world more splendid, more interesting, and more terrifying. It helps Catherine cope with her guardian Mrs. Allen’s dull conversation about clothing, and the uncertainty of her new life in Bath and Northanger Abbey. In the pages of Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, Catherine is freed from “all worldly concerns of dressing and dinner”; to have a “raised, restless, and frightened imagination” is a “luxury” (Austen, 50). Catherine enhances and transforms her world through the escape of novels and willful misreading of her circumstances.

Catherine eventually comes to learn how to navigate reality as it is. Some readers still find this growth unsatisfying, however. While active in her mind, Catherine remains mostly passive on the page. But I think this is less a critique of Catherine and more to do with the world she is thrown into and forced to navigate.

Catherine receives no useful guidance. Mrs. Allen is too frivolous to be a worthy mentor, and Isabella, her new, seemingly very mature friend in Bath, is actually duplicitous and self-centered. Catherine has to learn lessons on her own, ones that Austen is aware will leave a sour taste in the reader’s mouth. Austen infamously writes “a woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing [sic], should conceal it as well as she can” (106). Even in the 19th Century, this was saying the quiet part out loud. Catherine is, fortunately, as ignorant as they come, which attracts Henry Tilney to her, since he is able to educate her and show off his knowledge and wisdom without his masculinity being at all threatened. Catherine “did not know her own advantages”; she doesn’t know enough to feign ignorance in a world that encourages women to be passive and encouraging to men (Austen, 106). This creates comedy (Catherine blunders her way into a perfect match without realizing how she did it), but there is a bite to it as well. Through Catherine, Austen critiques the world she lives in, while also acknowledging that women must still navigate that world as surely and successfully as they can.

Catherine’s most famous mistake is her misreading of General Tilney, the father of her love interest. Influenced by the Gothic novels she devours, Catherine comes to believe that General Tilney has either murdered or trapped his wife in Northanger Abbey. This is quite the dramatic blunder, even more off base than Elizabeth Bennet’s misreading of Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham. And yet, there is some truth in Catherine’s intuitions. She is correct that General Tilney is not a good person (he later turns Catherine out of Northanger Abbey after discovering that she isn’t as wealthy as he thought she was). And rather than upbraid Catherine for her mistake, I think it’s worth considering why she made it.

Diane Long Hoeveler points out that Catherine clearly harbors some fear over marriage (16). This anxiety is exacerbated by the novels that she reads, but it has basis in fact. Men control every part of women’s lives in Austen’s world. Women are entirely at their mercy, just as Gothic heroines are at the mercy of the men attempting to murder, assault, or otherwise harm them. Gothic novels provide more than just escape for Catherine: they validate her anxieties, and present a world where women can triumph over male oppressors (albeit only in moral purity, in their status as helpless victims) (Hoeveler, 5). Catherine is also victimized by patriarchal figures with inordinate power over her, and it’s here that we must consider the influence of genre.

As I said before, Northanger Abbey is a satire. It uses the tropes of Gothic fiction to analyze both Gothic novels and the world they reflect. Catherine is the vehicle through which Austen is able to make these ambitious critiques. Too often, we read characters as if they were real people, independent of the story they are players in. I think we should instead consider characters as part of the fabric of a story, and the point that the author is trying to make. Northanger Abbey could not exist without Catherine’s naivety, open mind, and, yes, ignorance.

With all this in mind, I’d like to turn to Austen’s authorial defense of the novel form, featured fairly early in Northanger Abbey, which, in my opinion, is one of her sharpest critiques of patriarchal control and its subtle influence. Using an elevated tone, Austen’s defense might initially seem entirely sincere and earnest, without a hint of irony. This is probably how Catherine would read it. And in some ways, she would be correct. Austen points out that women’s novels are devalued when compared to the “superior” work of men. In a mock conversation, she writes:

“’I am no novel reader—I seldom look into novels—Do you imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.’ –Such is the common cant.— ‘And what are you reading, Miss—?’ ‘Oh! it is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. –‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;’ or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” (Austen, 36-37).

If you want to know why you should read Jane Austen, I think that the author herself makes a strong case here. It is abundantly clear that had the novel in question been written by:

“Milton, Pope, [or] Prior…how proudly would [the female reader] have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication…which no longer concern any one living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it” (Austen, 36-37).

Because men (a generalization used very generally) decide what literature matters, they of course would defend the work of men as “real writing”. The work new artists (male and female) read is that belonging to the literary canon of “real writing”. This is the work they imitate and honor. Men are taught that reading women’s work makes them effeminate, and women are taught that it makes them stupid. And the cycle continues.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t read male authors, of course. Austen is also critiquing people who truly find these authors to be irrelevant to their own times and not worth reading. You could stop there, and argue that that is all she is saying. But I think there are many layers to this, and that Austen is equally poking fun at people who do read Milton, Pope, and Prior, and get absolutely nothing out of it. Many people, unfortunately, (still) believe that reading is a chore, a duty, an obligation. They read books they don’t like to appear more intelligent or cultured. Essentially, Austen is criticizing people like Isabella Thorpe and her brother John Thorpe: those who read novels only for social reasons, and those who don’t read them at all.

But I do believe that Austen’s central point—that the work of female authors, particularly female authors of popular fiction—remains earnest and true. She is eerily prescient when she writes, “there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them” (Austen, 36). Prescient because very little has actually changed in our assessments of literature since the 19th Century. Ironically, Austen’s own work has been devalued in the same way. The fact that she “only writes romances” has been a general critique of her novels, as if focusing on the lives of women through a navigation of patriarchy is the same as a bodice-ripper. There’s nothing wrong with bodice-rippers, but they simply aren’t what Austen is writing, nor are they the women’s literature she is here defending. We should have the generosity to read novels for what they are. After all, you wouldn’t read a ghost story, then complain that it isn’t realistic. So too should we read Austen’s work with generic expectations in mind. It is only then that we can recognize how she plays with them.

So, why should you read Northanger Abbey? For one, it teaches us how to read novels in a larger literary context. It’s also an easy read, compared to, say, Persuasion, making it a great way to break into Austen’s work. And, like all of Austen’s work, it is endlessly delightful.

And yet, for all the light, picturesque enjoyment of Woodston Parsonage where Henry Tilney and Catherine eventually live together, and for all the witty commentary on Bath society, there is also a dark underbelly at the heart of Northanger Abbey. As Diane Hoeveler notes in her essay “Vindicating Northanger Abbey”, the abbey itself is a lost past. Remodeled by General Tilney, the strange, Gothic beauty of Northanger Abbey is lost to modernity. A place where women could once form community outside of male influence is eradicated by a patriarchal figure. The ghostly nun haunts the novel, just as the specter of Mrs. Tilney’s death haunts Catherine (Hoeveler, 16). There is more to Northanger Abbey (both the novel and the place) than meets the eye, and radical ideas beneath the surface. I suggest that you give this novel a try, and see if you, like Catherine, can find your way through a Gothic maze of artful language and brilliant imagination, to gain a more refined understanding of reality.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane, and Marilyn Butler. Northanger Abbey. Penguin Books, 2003.

Duquette, Natasha. “‘Motionless Wonder’: Contemplating Gothic Sublimity in ‘Northanger Abbey.’” Jane Austen Society of North America, vol. 30, no. 2, 2010.

Hoeveler, Diane. “Vindicating ‘Northanger Abbey’: Wollstonecraft, Austen, and Gothic Feminism.” Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism, St. Martin’s Press (Macmillan), 1995, pp. 1–22.