Northanger Abbey is a pointed response to moralising texts like James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1766) – yes, the one that Mr Collins is so fond of in Pride and Prejudice – as well as to a broader literary culture that devalued novels and worried about their effects on their (young women) readers. Here, Austen is speaking about the context in which she was writing. “here seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them,” Austen writes in chapter five, directly addressing the reader – and assuring them that she has no interest in doing the same. It is a neat summation of the entire attitude of the book.Ī biting satire of popular 19th-century Gothic romances, Northanger Abbey is also a passionate defence of the novel and of novel-reading. So says Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland, the hero and heroine respectively of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (completed 1803, published posthumously in 1817). “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature.
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