Northanger Abbey

Abstract

Austen’s earliest novel, Northanger Abbey (1803; published 1818), is by far the most ‘bookish’. Written in response to contemporary fiction, it exhibits the most visibly comic relation to that fiction of all Austen’s full-length works. It insists on pointing up, and treating comically, the incongruities between literature and life, and the tendencies of novels to imitate each other rather than life. In this sense, Northanger Abbey is a novel about writing novels, even an ‘anti-novel’, as long as these terms imply no portentousness and allow Austen to delight in, and occasionally to exploit, the conventions she exposes and parodies. Later, in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, allusions to the conventions of contemporary fiction will be equally pervasive, but less obvious and more fully absorbed. Some conventions, especially structural ones, will simply be appropriated (courtship ending in marriage, two central contrasting female characters). Others, Austen will learn to use as one means to complicate and manipulate her readers’ responses to the characters: witness the problems for interpretation caused in Sense and Sensibility by Marianne Dashwood, who is a highly conventional character both in that her tastes, judgments and behaviour are governed by established modes of sensibility, and in that she shares this quality with many other contemporary heroines. Austen’s later novels include, then, some serious uses for literary conventions. In Northanger Abbey, however, comic, flamboyant and even outrageous allusions to books and their conventions are the rule.¹