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.
"Northanger Abbey is certainly not as acclaimed as Austen's latter works, but there are still a lot of aspects to be dug from its pages. I won't really go into those aspects since I'll be writing three essays on such in class, but as an utterly charmed Jane Austen reader, I must love this book because it's amazing in a different way from Pride and Prejudice and the rest. Jane Austen uses her delectable ability of satire to create a parody of a Gothic novel and one of the best heroes I've ever read in her own books and in literature. His name is Henry, Henry Tilney, clergyman and mouthpiece of Austen's didactic irony. The personalities of the naive Catherine and the playfully ironic Henry Tilney make for one of the best couples I've ever had the pleasure to read. In their relationship Austen creates something rare and, I think, irresistibly beautiful. Catherine is diffident and ignorant of the aspects of human nature and its tendencies, and Henry, drawn by the irresistible charm of teaching her, uses his characteristic irony to prompt her to form her own opinions and develop a sense of discernment. He does not take advantage of her ignorance to exploit her, but delights in spurring her, teaching her, and thus grows to love her. Yet at the same time, Catherine's fantastical distortion of reality, spurred by her avid reading of Gothic novels, sees through social pretense to the true nature of people like the General, who, although not murderously villainous, is still a mercenary and greedy--something which Henry, wrapped in his own notions of civility and realism, fails to see. Thus, I see this book as Austen playing a big ironic joke on her protagonists, yet teaching them, through the ridicule of their notions, to learn human nature more accurately. And it is a big ironic joke on us, the readers (or at least the sentimental ones like myself) as she deflates the glorified sentimentalities of romances with relish.
I truly enjoyed the excitement of Catherine's coming of age and maturing into a more discerning, less flighty young woman, and Austen's development of the most outspoken and impudent of her heroes; and although Northanger Abbey has been more criticized than praised over the years, I can't help but hold it as dear as her other volumes, and perhaps, for its defense of the novel as worthy of literary merit (and the creation of Henry Tilney) even more."
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Veronica (4 out of 5 stars)