Northanger Abbey (Penguin Classics)
by Jane Austen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jane AustenEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-04-29
ISBN: 0141439793
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780141439792
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Northanger Abbey (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: "But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine..."
Summary: 5 Stars
When I read the words written by Jane Austen telling me that Catherine Morland had been in training to become a heroine I knew I was going to enjoy this novel. This book allows us a glimpse of Jane Austen as a younger woman, as a beginning novelist and as a woman with a lovely sense of humor. There isn't any denying that this book, then titled "Susan", was the first to be sold by Austen to a publisher. There it languished in some forgotten corner for thirteen years before she tried to get it back from a firm which had no intention of publishing it. Ultimately she had to borrow the money to buy her own book back. People can probably get involved in scholarly discussions as to whether or not any revisions were made to this book by Jane Austen before her death, but that's isn't what I'm interested in. I wanted to read this book because I just couldn't believe that Jane Austen had really written a book which I didn't like. At all! Thankfully, I proved myself to be both right and wrong. I completely and thoroughly enjoyed this book and am only sorry that I allowed film versions of the book to turn me away from actually reading what the author had created.
Catherine Morland became a heroine for me to love and to sympathize with, while I watched her grow and mature. At the age of seventeen Catherine is quite young to be starring in her own novel but according to the times she lived in this was a perfectly respectable age for a young woman to become a wife and mother. Up until the time Catherine was fifteen she was the epitome of a tomboy, much preferring playing games outside to learning the skills to help her in her housekeeping and marriage. When she was around fifteen she discovered novels. It was the most delightful thing to read Jane Austen's words in defense of her heroine reading novels and particularly Gothic novels. The information contained within those books colored so much of Catherine's thinking and when she is given the opportunity of having a prolonged stay in Bath with close friends and neighbors she is ecstatic. Mr and Mrs Allen will become the surrogate parents of this young woman for their stay and upon arrival Mrs Allen continually bemoans the fact that she knows nobody in Bath, therefore she and Catherine are restricted as to who they can talk to. Very quickly Mrs Allen meets a former schoolmate, Mrs Thorpe, her son and daughters, and from then on Catherine can move in society with Isabella Thorpe and later her brother John Thorpe. One process leads to another and Catherine makes the acquaintance of Eleanor and Henry Tilney along with their father Colonel Tilney. Austen uses Catherine and her new friends to demonstrate the social limits and restrictions on young women of the time. She also illustrates how easily deceit can be camouflaged as friendship.
My reading of this novel was enhanced greatly because I was sharing the experience with a friend. We discussed the novel from the viewpoint of our previous interest in the writings of Jane Austen. I must rank this book right up there with my other favorite novels now. Yes, there is melodrama. Yes, Catherine is a very young woman prone to being fooled by others. Thankfully it is also about Catherine conquering her fears caused by the melodrama by facing reality and Catherine learning to see the motives of other people more clearly.
This novel is Jane Austen at her most natural, at least it seems that way to me. She is obviously having fun with this writing, she also seems to genuinely like her heroine and the other "good" characters in the book and shows us the deceitful characters we all need to recognize and avoid. Austen seems young in thought and spirit in this writing. The prose is light and very readable. It is also a relatively short novel. I would have liked for it to be longer (of course!) but specifically because I would have liked for some of the characters, even major characters, to have been presented in fuller form. The only portion I'm definitely a little disappointed with happens in the final chapter, but I'll let you discover that for yourself. Who knows, you might not have the same reaction at all. I do highly recommend this novel as a truly great early novel from a writer who was to go on to a fame which probably would have truly surprised her. This Penguin Classic edition is a wonderful version of this novel. It contains much information aside from the novel which was a great help for me while I was reading. The Notes from each chapter by Marilyn Butler, Exeter College, Oxford, were invaluable in keeping me in the time frame of what was happening in Austen's world when this book was written. I also highly recommend this specific edition of Northanger Abbey.
Summary of Northanger Abbey (Penguin Classics)
Listen to audio presented by Literary Affairs: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.
View our feature on Jane Austen.During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine's love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination influenced by novels of sensation and intrigue, Catherine imagines terrible crimes committed by General Tilney. With its broad comedy and irrepressible heroine, this is the most youthful and and optimistic of Jane Austen's works.
Though Northanger Abbey is one of Jane Austen's earliest novels, it was not published until after her death--well after she'd established her reputation with works such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Of all her novels, this one is the most explicitly literary in that it is primarily concerned with books and with readers. In it, Austen skewers the novelistic excesses of her day made popular in such 18th-century Gothic potboilers as Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Decrepit castles, locked rooms, mysterious chests, cryptic notes, and tyrannical fathers all figure into Northanger Abbey, but with a decidedly satirical twist. Consider Austen's introduction of her heroine: we are told on the very first page that "no one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine." The author goes on to explain that Miss Morland's father is a clergyman with "a considerable independence, besides two good livings--and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters." Furthermore, her mother does not die giving birth to her, and Catherine herself, far from engaging in "the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush" vastly prefers playing cricket with her brothers to any girlish pastimes.
Catherine grows up to be a passably pretty girl and is invited to spend a few weeks in Bath with a family friend. While there she meets Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor, who invite her to visit their family estate, Northanger Abbey. Once there, Austen amuses herself and us as Catherine, a great reader of Gothic romances, allows her imagination to run wild, finding dreadful portents in the most wonderfully prosaic events. But Austen is after something more than mere parody; she uses her rapier wit to mock not only the essential silliness of "horrid" novels, but to expose the even more horrid workings of polite society, for nothing Catherine imagines could possibly rival the hypocrisy she experiences at the hands of her supposed friends. In many respects Northanger Abbey is the most lighthearted of Jane Austen's novels, yet at its core is a serious, unsentimental commentary on love and marriage, 19th-century British style. --Alix Wilber
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