Northanger Abbey Book

Jane Austen's novels are just about romance and naïve women. There just another telling of boy meets girl in an uninspiring way with a few social issues thrown in. Well, ashamed as I am to admit it, that is what I used to believe in my woefully idiotic ignorance. How foolish of me. Now that I've actually bothered to read one of her novels, because I had to for university purposes, I realise how stupid I was to actually think this. Jane Austen is one of, if not the, best novelists of all time. If you disbelieve me, and held a similar opinion to my own, then read one of her novels and find out for yourself.

That being said though Catherine, the protagonist of this novel, is somewhat ignorant and naïve to the ways of the world; but, she had to be. Indeed, if not Austen would have been unable to achieve such an endearing comment on the absurdity of society, the role of women in that said society, and the ignorance toward the unpopular literary craft of the novel. How else if not though the eyes of an innocent young girl who cannot understand the mechanisms of these aspects of the world? Who when thrust into the pump room (a sort of ball room for dance and socialising) has virtually no idea how to behave.



Catherine has an immeasurable misunderstanding of the intentions of others, and a misguided view that the world is like one of her beloved books: a romantic adventure with a little bit of popular gothic thrown in for excitement. She cannot comprehend the reasoning behind her friend, Isabella Thorpe's, behaviour and how she is only leading her brother along; she cannot understand that Henry's father is not a gothic villain, but a man in mourning with a harsh temper: her vision has become obscured.

"Catherine's blood ran cold with the horrid suggestions which naturally sprang from these words. Could it be possible? - Could Henry's father? - And yet how many were the examples to justify even the blackest suspicions!"

This is achieved through a narration that is a work of genius. Austen has satirised the conventions of gothic literature by writing a semi-gothic novel herself that is focalised through the experience of Catherine. Catherine is well read, but only as far as the gothic genre allows. This has clouded her interpretation of the events that occur around her, consequently, life to her has become akin to the works by authors such as Radcliffe.



This means that by the time that Catherine arrives at the abbey she expects it to be this place of utter darkness and dread; she expects to be a gothic castle and the home to a tyrannical gothic villain. However, when the veil is lifted and she realises that her life is in fact not a book and the motivations of the people in it are not what she thought them to be, the revelation of how foolish she has been dawns upon her. I'm not going to lie, I felt like Catherine at this point; I held a ridiculous opinion that when lifted allowed me to see the work of Austen for what it was: utter brilliance.

I love Northanger Abbey; it is brilliant. Jane Austen is the master of her craft; her work is what she argued the novel to be:

"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."