Northanger Abbey (1803)

Although this novel by Jane Austen was published in 1817 as her fifth—indeed, published posthumously—it is actually her first completed novel as of 1803, when she was in her late 20s. She just couldn’t get a publisher for it during her lifetime. Honestly, it’s not hard to see why, even given that things change over two centuries. It doesn’t have the light touch she maintains in the best of her stuff. It’s more like apprentice work, the novelist working out how to do it. There are some fun details here, such as Austen’s fascination, via the main character, Catherine Morland, with gothic literature and the “seven horrid novels,” such as Castle of Wolfenbach by Eliza Parsons, The Necromancer by Lawrence Flammenberg, etc. We end up at the abbey of the title, now the home of the Tilney family, with some timid gothic flourishes there. It does take us half the book to get there. It’s a short novel but the scenes at Bath that occupy the first half are an arguably overlong prelude. This is what I mean by somewhat awkward apprentice work. The situation is complex, with youths and their siblings sorting themselves into friends and prospective partners. You know the drill: single men in want of wives and the women who want them. Friendships and love relations blossom or go sour. Austen’s characters here seemed more stock to me, but the situations can be ingenious in terms of moving players around the board. To a certain degree I wish she had leaned harder into the gothic stuff, but the better choice is probably what she came up with. Again, if the prelude felt too leisurely, the finish is certainly too rushed, polished off lickety-split in two or three chapters. All’s well that ends well, I guess? I have to admit this one makes me much less interested in pursuing the stories or fragments that came before it, though Love and Friendship still bears some interest because of the movie by director Whit Stillman. That just leaves me with Persuasion for now, taken as her sixth novel, also published posthumously but the last she wrote before her death (at age 41) in 1817. I have some high hopes for that, but we’ll see.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.