We are meeting on SUNDAY 7p.m. UK time to discuss Northanger Abbey
**I will record most of the session so that people who cannot join can watch it later.**
Whatever you want to ask or discuss, you can drop in the comments here. Do you love this book, or do you find it boring? Is Catherine Morland sympathetic or irritating? Do you find the Gothic stuff witty or wearing?
MEETING LINK — https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83748033086?pwd=XefDAXj0SHEZKDuO5HypHZbC2H7B4y.1
Find your local number: https://us06web.zoom.us/u/kcdPGyKmTb
First time reading this book. I'm willing to hear the other side of this, but for me, if it misses the mark it misses only in a narrow way. I believe we would apply the word 'experimental' to a book like this nowadays. There is so much to dig about the portrayal of her characters for me to complain much. (As an aside: I also noted an echo of the Shakespearean pragmatism in the last line!) The book is impressive. The texture of it, the myriad of voices, Catherine's powerful and overwhelming imagination, and Henry's perception and 'thinking' as he speaks--he narrates, observes, flirts, and corrects his and Catherine's conclusions often in a single paragraph.
I have always loved this novel. I empathize with Catherine, and identify with the way books play such a meaningful role in her inner dialogue. And I appreciate how Austen both overtly and subtly comments on the then popular notion that novels were both frivolous and dangerous. Catherine was both misled by gothic romances and attuned to the threat that powerful men posed to young (naive) women. She wasn’t wrong to sense a threat at Northanger. It’s also interesting to see the ways Austen revised the novel in later years; the layering in of free indirect speech (and maybe thought) is readily identifiable.