Northanger Abbey and the critics

A much loved novel that we now understand very well

Last time I wrote about Northanger Abbey, I promised a review of what the critics have said. If you ever want to get a sense of the history of criticism for a major author, you will find, in a good library, books called The Critical Heritage. For each author they provide in one or two volumes a chronological anthology of the reviews, essays, diaries, and some scholarly criticism of the major works. Invaluable books and very instructive.

In May 1818 an unsigned notice appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine stating that they were “happy to receive two other novels from the pen of this amiable and agreeable authoress”. What a way to refer to Jane Austen! What a way to talk about Persuasion and Northanger Abbey! However, their praise was high—, Austen was under-rated, deserved to be better regarded, and would one day be one of the most popular novelists. Alas, the writer thought that she dealt in no “deep interests, uncommon characters, or vehement passions.” They are surely right that her genius was to write about “the history of people whom we have seen a thousand times”, but! what we admire is surely how unfamiliar she makes them; it is like watching an egg being cracked open for the very first time. Who would have predicted the insides from the shell? The rest of the piece praises her good Christian character. Quite right.

Such was Northanger Abbey’s introduction to the world.

Published alongside Persuasion after Austen died, it was reviewed early in the British Critic, a journal which had been set up to oppose the rising radicalism of the Jacobins in the 1790s. The British Critic reviewed a lot of books. It took, they wrote in this review, “a vast quantity of useful spirits and patience” in order to find books worth reviewing. One knows what they mean. Presumably the spirits were sometimes taken with water as they made their way through “an endless series of gloomy caverns, long and winding passages, secret trap doors…”. They are, of course, mocking the gothic novel (they refer also to the east wing of an old castle, banditti, and so on).

However, good novels are among the most fascinating productions of modern literature—and the British Critic thought Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were very good indeed: Austen, they said, displays “a degree of excellence that has not often been surpassed.” She lacks imagination, everything being quite familiar from normal life, but, “every individual represents a class… one of those classes to which we ourselves, and every acquaintance we have, in all probability belong.” (You will recall that this is what Johnson said of Shakespeare: “In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.”)

Her merit consists altogether in her remarkable talent for observation; no ridiculous phrase, no affected sentiment, no foolish pretension seems to escape her notice. It is scarcely possible to read her novels, without meeting some of one’s own absurdities reflected back upon one’s conscience.

So far, so ordinary. Then they say this: “our authoress never dips her pen in satire.” The British Critic thinks Austen treats follies instead “with good-humoured pleasantry”. Today we are just as likely to think of Austen as a satirical hater than as merely good humoured. That aside, we must stare in wonder at the idea that Northanger Abbey is not a satire. Instead the British Critic called it “simply, the history of a young girl.” After a summary of the plot, they call Northanger Abbey “one of the very best of Miss Austen’s productions”. (The reviewer had very little to say about Persuasion, thinking it “a much less fortunate performance.” The past is another country indeed.)

In 1821 Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, echoed Samuel Johnson in warning that when fiction becomes realistic (“copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life”) it is a more morally dangerous class of work, because it “guides the judgement, and supplies a kind of artificial experience.” Realistic novels are apt to make us think that we, too, shall come to a happy ending, irrespective of our conduct, Whately warned. (And indeed, it is thought that people who watch too many Rom Coms are unhappier in love.)

Whately was writing about Austen posthumously. She was a great source of both innocent amusement and “instructive example”, he lamented, even if her plots were too much dependent on “providential coincidences” which he thought a fault. What he did admire was Austen’s evident merits as a Christian writer. This was enhanced because she did not make it “at all obtrusive.” The moral lessons “spring incidentally from the story”: they are not preached.

Maria Edgeworth (and the British Critic) found fault with the General, whose expulsion of Catherine Morland at the end was deemed “out of drawing and out of nature” and “not a very probable character.” In 1842, Henry Crabb Robinson said Northanger “sadly reduced” his estimation of Austen, being a “gallery of disagreeables” with heroes and heroines “scarcely out of the class of insignificants.”

What all this shows is that it is often very hard to know quite why a book is impressive at the time. Nothing these critics said was quite wrong, but they are all too tied up, one way or another, in the ideological discourse of their times to see the whole novel clearly. You may be thinking to yourself that we, too, are too ideologically preoccupied to read Jane Austen clearly, as I argued in the Financial Times recently (and as Lauren Groff abundantly demonstrated in her lamentable assessment of Mansfield Park in the New York Times), but in fact there is a century of good scholarship from Mary Lascelles to John Mullan that has illuminated Austen quite clearly. One recent thesis even made advances in understanding her narrative techniques.

In 1885, Matthew Arnold’s niece, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, while reviewing Austen’s letters, said that Northanger Abbey was “gay, sparkling, and rapid… from beginning to end” and that it was “the book in which the bright energy of Austen’s youth finds it gayest and freshest expression.” Ward said Catherine Morland was the “inimitable literary expression” of the “exuberant girlish wit, which expressed itself in letters and talk and harmless flirtations before it took to itself literary shape”.

In 1894, George Saintsbury said in passing (in his Pride and Prejudice Preface, which is well worth reading) that many find the “delightful freshness and humour” of Northanger Abbey to obscure the fact that it is small in scale, and that parody is one of the genres “in which the first rank is reached with difficulty.” In 1917 Reginald Farrer (a botanist and writer who worked in the Foreign Office) said Austen took “a big stride forward” in Northanger Abbey by tackling a technical problem: weaving together parody and serious drama.

Rebecca West wrote an introduction to Northanger in 1932, where she pointed to the fact that Austen was putting English institutions to the test as a feminist—many had written about Isabella Thorpe-types before, but from the masculine perspective. “Husband hunting was shameful and horrible,” West said, “but there was every reason why one should join in the hunt.” As is now so commonplace as to have been grossly overstated (Austen hardly faced destitution), Austen knew about financial uncertainty. West rated the book highly, putting aside the imperfect satire of Udolpho in favour of its other delights.

It is sharp with Jane Austen’s hate of unpleasant things, it is sweet with her love of all that is pleasant, it nourishes with her special wit that is the extremity of good sense; and her genius for character drawing is at its happiest here.

Henry and Catherine are “not in the least insipid” but “rich with the special charm that attends the conjunction of good souls and good breeding”. She also points to the “wealth of phrases” which “evoke a whole phase of existence”, such as: “I did not quite like, at breakfast, to hear you talk so much about the French bread at Northanger.” To West, the book made Austen’s early death as ominous as Mozart’s—it seems to hint “that too urgent a thirst for perfection can only be quenched in the grave.”

In 1939 Mary Lascelles, a pioneering Austen scholar, took up the idea of the burlesque and praised Austen’s skill at handling the varieties of burlesque, though she thought this was not well integrated with the overall narrative. She thought the use of Henry Tilney as the “interpreter” rather than the narrator was “ingenious”. He points out the difference between life and fiction, as the narrator has been playfully doing, but once Catherine is enchanted by Isabella, he steps back. We do not need them both. Catherine goes off to discover the world as it is, and at the end, Henry “leads her over the threshold.”

In 1940, D.W. Harding based his idea that Austen was a hater on Henry Tilney’s comment about a “neighbourhood of voluntary spies”. In 1952 Marvin Mudrick noted the anti-types Austen establishes against the tropes of gothic fiction. (Henry Tilney, for example, is a gothic hero reversed: he doesn’t fall in love at first sight; he doesn’t even rescue her from the clutches of a villain.) Austen follows the gothic in making the heroine’s consciousness the centre of the action, but the heroine’s function is doubled. She is writing both a gothic and a realistic novel and Catherine may be too “lightweight a mind” to carry this doubling. Ultimately he sees the rejection of romance as a rejection of personality. Catherine is neither “the borrowed heroine of pure burlesque” nor so “interesting and complex” as would be required “to sustain the necessary tensions at the center of a realistic novel.”

To Elizabeth Hardwick in 1965, it was a relief on re-reading Northanger to find the gothic parody “the merest side issue… the weakest part of a strong novel.” Hardwick thought Austen felt the threat of Mrs. Radcliffe’s popularity strongly. (It is worth, by the way, comparing the parodic element of Northanger to Cold Comfort Farm.) Hardwick didn’t see Northanger as a work of literary criticism but “an engaging story of human beings in pursuit of love”, an odd thing for such a reliable critic to say, as the whole novel is explicitly about reading books and people. She does concede that the characters in Northanger are “more sketchily drawn” than in the later novels.

Marilyn Butler, a decade later, explicated Northanger as a response to a moral idea, not a literary mode. The early work was not “burlesque” but anti-Jacobin. (Hence the praise from the British Critic above.) Northanger, she argues, “uses the literary conversation not for the sake of the subject, but in order to give an appropriately morally objective ground against which character can be judged.” The five explicit conversations about the gothic novel challenge us to “consider the habits of mind which the different speakers reveal.” There is nothing partisan in the novel, but John Thorpe is a “revolutionary character who represents “a system of selfishness” and seeks to undermine institutions like marriage. Isabella Thorpe, too, is one of a series of dangerous women in Austen’s novels, who follow “the modern creed of self.” All of this could have come from the British Critic.

As I have written, or will write about, elsewhere, modern readings have focussed on the influence of Smith’s ideas of the virtues, Austen’s understanding of strategic thinking, and her position as an enlightenment thinker. We can see a clear development in the twentieth century. Critics deal with the same themes, and hold Northanger in respect, but are more detailed, closer readers, and put more context round the novel; there is, on the whole, a fuller understanding of what Austen was doing.