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Deborah Barnum wrote about the publishing history of Northanger Abbey in December, at the beginning of my blog series “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,” and now that we’re about halfway through the series, she’s contributed a guest post on the publishing history of Persuasion.[image error]If you missed any of the posts on Northanger Abbey and want to catch up, you can find them all listed here. We’ll spend April, May, and June talking about Persuasion. 

Deb is a former law librarian and she’s currently the owner of Bygone Books, an online shop of collectible books in Burlington, Vermont. She’s the Co-Regional Coordinator for the Vermont Region of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), and she compiles the annual “Jane Austen Bibliography” for Persuasions-Online and the Burney bibliography for The Burney Journal. A long-time JASNA member, she serves on the Publications Committee. She’s also a board member of NAFCHL (North American Friends of Chawton House Library). You can find her online at Jane Austen in Vermont. Welcome back, Deb, and thank you for celebrating Persuasion with us!

Here’s the first paragraph of Deb’s post on Persuasion:

I begin with my own prejudice – Persuasion has long been my favorite Austen novel. One cannot dispute the joy of reading Pride and Prejudice; or the laughter at the pure innocence and brilliance of Northanger Abbey; we can sympathize with the moral steadfastness of Fanny in Mansfield Park, savor the (im)perfections of Emma (both the book and heroine!), and revel in that dawning realization that Sense and Sensibility is so much better than at first thought. But it is Persuasion that holds my abiding affection – a novel of second chances, a novel that seems closest in some inexplicable way to Jane Austen herself, a romance where she actually plays out the agony of lost and found love, and so unlike her, a profession of love that she actually doesn’t back off from and leave the reader to their own imaginings!

But here today, I am only going to talk of how it all came to be…

Read the rest on her blog, Jane Austen in Vermont.

[image error]Sixteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.”  Coming soon: guest posts by L. Bao Bui, Daniel Woolf, and Elisabeth Lenckos.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

In today’s guest post for “Youth and Experience,” Deborah Knuth Klenck and Ted Scheinman discuss both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Next week, we’ll turn to Persuasion, with a post by Deborah Barnum on the publishing history of the novel. We’ll come back to Northanger Abbey towards the end of the blog series, in June.

Here’s a photo of Deborah Knuth Klenck visiting Jane Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral in 1992, with her children Ted and Jane.

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Deborah was in England that year leading a semester-long Jane Austen Study Group for Colgate University English majors, and, as it happens, she is there again right now, leading her seventh Austen Study Group. She is Professor of English at Colgate, where she teaches classes on Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and other writers. She has spoken at several JASNA AGMs over the years, from New York City to Santa Fe to Lake Louise to Milwaukee, and she’s been a frequent guest at the annual Chapel Hill, NC Jane Austen Summer Program. For my “Emma in the Snow” blog series, she contributed a guest post on long and short speeches in Emma, and what they tell us about Austen’s characters.

Ted is a writer and scholar whose first book, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan, was published earlier this month. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, Slate, and a variety of other periodicals. He’s based in Southern California, where he works as a senior editor at Pacific Standard magazine.

I’ve been reading and enjoying excerpts from Camp Austen and I’m looking forward to reading the book, which Publishers’ Weekly calls “a loving and often humorous tribute to the Janeites of the world.” Here are a couple of excerpts: “How Dressing as Mr. Darcy Taught Me Not to Be an Academic Snob” and “Corsets and Cotillions: An Evening with the Jane Austen Society.” And here’s Ted’s “Guide to Jane Austen and Children.”

In the introduction to an interview with Deborah (“I Think of It as a Mom-oir”), Ted says, “When I began to write a short book about attending a Jane Austen summer camp, I did not anticipate how much the resulting book would be about my mother. In retrospect, it could hardly have been otherwise. … As a kid I read very little Austen, but I knew that my mother loved her and I admired my mother for this love. The novels seemed to promise transport to a realm of refinement and wisdom, and I wanted to go there with her.”

It’s a pleasure to introduce this conversation between Deborah and Ted.

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DJKK: The cascade of 200th anniversaries in Austen studies in 2017 culminated in the simultaneous commemorations of Austen’s death and the posthumous publication of both her very first and her very last completed novels. Ted Scheinman and I have been reflecting on these two texts—and bandying words.

Though I have long thought that Emma is, of all the books in the canon, the one that best repays re-reading, this year’s juxtaposition of Northanger Abbey with Persuasion has surprised me. My most recent treats in 2017 were two conferences about Persuasion (the Jane Austen Summer Program at UNC Chapel Hill and the Halifax, Nova Scotia, meeting focused on the Austen family’s ties to the navy—and to Halifax itself), so I’ve chosen to focus on the Persuasion side of this pairing. But there turn out to be many commonalities between Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

The latter book opens with the opening of a book, of course, the Elliot family’s copy of the Baronetage, and with the blunt summary about the baronet himself, “Vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character; vanity of person and of situation” (Volume 1, Chapter 1). This detail is the first of what I think of as the many gender displacements throughout the novel. In several events and relationships in Persuasion, it seems that the feminine takes the lead, whether it’s Captain Wentworth comparing his first ship the Asp with an old pelisse, Mrs. Croft taking the reins of the family gig to prevent accidents, or Anne’s statement about authorship “the pen has been in [men’s] hands” being contradicted before she utters it (“[the noise] was nothing more than that [Captain Wentworth’s] pen had fallen down”) (Volume 2, Chapter 11).

When we consider that naval heroes are also more or less pirates, it can be a surprise to find them all so genteel—and gentle.

The novel discusses Sir Walter’s personal beauty much more than any woman’s—which makes one wonder whether Mr. Darcy is wrong about vanity (“a weakness indeed”): perhaps Sir Walter’s vanity is indeed justified (Pride and Prejudice, Volume 1, Chapter 11). We never meet Lady Elliot, of course, but we can still be surprised that, as an “excellent, . . .  sensible and amiable” woman, she married Sir Walter at all (Persuasion, Volume 1, Chapter 1). To attract the otherwise discerning Lady Elliot, Sir Walter must have been the George Clooney—or, for an “Austen” reference, the Colin Firth—of his day (and of course, it’s always still “his day”).

We are more accustomed to find sensible men smitten—precisely, in two cases, “captivated,” in fact—by air-headed women (Pride and Prejudice, Volume 2, Chapter 19; Mansfield Park, Volume 1, Chapter 1) than the other way around.

TS: . . . and yet here we find an air-headed man captivated by himself! (One suspects that Sir Walter is susceptible to flattery from a striving lady because he has become so susceptible to his own.) I’d point out that, like Persuasion, Northanger Abbey opens with the opening of a book, or rather of several, in the florilegium of trite wisdom that Catherine’s biographer rattles off in the first chapter. But your remark on the Baronetage makes me think for the first time about how both novels include characters who are addicted to, and seduced by, the wrong kind of book, and are thereby confounded when the world does not conform to their literary expectations.

Speaking of literary expectations, Catherine seems to be half-right when she presumes some sort of Gothic moral decrepitude on the part of General Tilney. While she is wrong to suspect that the General murdered his wife—Henry informs her that he was present for the final days of his mother’s treatment, and that nothing suspicious happened—she is not necessarily wrong in thinking that the General’s relationship with his late wife involved an imbalance of virtue, in much the same way that Sir Walter’s marriage did; as Henry explains with a ginger diplomacy, the General is no gallant, but that Catherine has “’erred in supposing him not attached to her. He loved her, I am persuaded, as well as it was possible for him to—we have not all, you know, the same tenderness of disposition’″ (Volume 2, Chapter 9).

Catherine and the General are suspicious of each other in different ways, and each tests the other at various opportunities. Of course, the General is guilty of precisely what he accuses Catherine of—immoral, calculated fortune-hunting—and one of the most cutting ironies is that Catherine, however addled by novels, is still a better judge of character than the allegedly gimlet-eyed General.

What do you think, Mom? We see similar extended motifs of reversal in Persuasion, no?

DJKK: . . . Indeed. (And “captivated by himself”! Why didn’t I turn that phrase?)

Persuasion’s more obvious reversal is the shift among the social classes: the Crofts moving in to Kellynch Hall as the Elliots retreat to paltry rented rooms in Bath, just as the navy list supplants the Baronetage as the standard reference-book. Sir Walter’s complaints about the ennobling of naval heroes (even “’Lord St. Ives, whose father we all know to have been a country curate, without bread to eat’”) smack of the sort of unforgivable snobbery Emma engages in during her least fine hour—dismissing Robert Martin as one of “’the yeomanry’” (Persuasion, Volume 1, Chapter 4; Emma, Volume 1, Chapter 4). But Sir Walter’s comical mix-up of his ideas about class with his ideas about facial beauty almost blunt his disdain for naval arrivistes. The facial becomes farcical when Mrs. Clay tries to shoehorn herself into a conversation about the detrimental effects of seafaring upon naval officers:

“The sea is no beautifier, certainly; sailors do grow old betimes . . . they soon lose the look of youth. But then, is not it the same with many other professions . . . ? Soldiers, in active service, are not at all better off: and even in the quieter professions, there is a toil and a labour of the mind . . . which seldom leaves a man’s looks to the natural effect of time. The lawyer plods, quite care-worn; the physician is up at all hours, and travelling in all weather; and even the clergyman”—she stopt a moment to consider what might do for the clergyman;—“and even the clergyman, you know, is obliged to go into infected rooms, and expose his health and looks to all the injury of a poisonous atmosphere.”

Mrs. Clay’s fulsome, lengthy speech is a classic: it’s right up there with Mr. Elton’s proposal to Emma. The absurdity of a woman elaborately complimenting a man’s complexion is just the first instance of Mrs. Clay’s speech inverting social norms. Her style betrays her lack of delicacy, too. She repeats herself in a very pedestrian way (“soon lose the look of youth” adds nothing in style or substance to “grow old betimes”). Then, she starts reciting her list of three professions before making sure she has three separate things to say. Bad prose-stylists, overreaching for the cadence of a trio of phrases, often add a synonym of the second thing as a third thing in the list, for the sake of “three-ness.” Flummoxed in mid-speech, Mrs. Clay has used up on the physician words more appropriate for the clergyman, and finds herself at a loss, so that the clergyman’s dangers must become somehow those of a medical man (Emma, Volume 1, Chapter 4; Persuasion, Volume 1, Chapter 3). Her logical conclusion is that only landed gentlemen “’who can live in a regular way’” retain, like Sir Walter, “’the blessings of health and a good appearance to the utmost.’” Somehow, Mrs. Clay reminds me here of Mr. Rushworth as he meets his father-in-law-to-be in the aftermath of the Lovers’ Vows débacle, affirming that, rather than acting, “’I think we are a great deal better employed sitting comfortably . . . doing nothing’” (Mansfield Park, Volume 2, Chapter 1). A fitting “employment,” forsooth!

TS: Yes, and General Tilney seems to share in Mrs. Clay’s superstition about class and appearance; the General scours Catherine’s person and comportment for any hint of money, and finds those hints where he likes. In one passage that feels just a bit creepy, he extols the “’elasticity’″ of Catherine’s walk—an expression I always take less as lechery and more as a sort of classism. Persuasion too contains an important line about elasticity, and what it tells us about character—but crucially, there, it is not the superficial elasticity of the body, but an ″elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried [Mrs. Smith] out of herself, which was from nature alone.″ Anne correctly perceives a sort of moral aristocracy in Mrs. Smith’s elasticity of mind, where the General incorrectly perceives an upper-class breeding in Catherine’s gait.

Of course in Northanger Abbey, the General wishes to court Catherine’s admiration as well. He so enjoys showing off—whether it’s his own figure (“He was a very handsome man, of a commanding aspect, past the bloom, but not past the vigour of life” [Volume 1, Chapter 10]), his newly designed offices, or his succession houses with their pineapples (Volume 2, Chapters 7 and 8), that he sometimes forgets to interrogate Catherine about her family’s—or even the Allens’—finances (Volume 1, Chapter 10). And, as for the presumption that Catherine is the Allens’ heir, the General never questions the source of that story: one would have thought that the General, a man of the world, could see through a “rattle” like John Thorpe!

DJK: Given Sir Walter’s dual shortcomings, “vanity of person and of situation” (Volume 1, Chapter 1), he can easily become distracted from judging Mrs. Clay’s social (“situational”) shortcomings—he even becomes unconscious of her freckles over time: this confusion is just one instance of a curious quality I see in this novel’s treatment of social class. The Elliot family, with the exception of Anne, worry about their status with the anxiety of nouveaux riches, ever eager to assert their superiority: having conceded that he must let his house, for example, Sir Walter immediately demurs absurdly about terms: “’I am not fond of the idea of my shrubberies being always approachable’” (Volume 1, Chapter 3). (What would be the correct time for approaching a shrubbery? Need one genuflect before doing so?) This “tenacity,” as Louisa Musgrove describes it, referring to Mary’s insistence on always taking precedence of her mother-in-law, might remind us of another person of high rank behaving badly: Lady Catherine de Bourgh sneers at the Bennets for having no governess (Volume 2, Chapter 6), meddles minutely in other people’s business (recommending shelves for the parsonage closet [Volume 1, Chapter 14]) and laying down the law about how Maria Lucas should pack her trunk [Volume 2, Chapter 14]). She even takes it on herself to predict the weather (Volume 2, Chapter 6). Lady Catherine employs a dedicated aide de camp to support her assertions of superiority: Mr. Collins is tasked to brag about such extravagances as the cost of glazing Rosings’s windows (even though this detail actually betrays how very modern is the late Sir Lewis de Bourgh’s not-so-ancestral pile).

I’ve always found the Elliots’ harping on their status curious, because it’s so inconsistent. Anne seems to be the only family member who feels the “degradation” one would expect, when Elizabeth boasts of having two drawing rooms in their rented accommodation in Camden-place. Even the green-house plants that decorate the card-party must be rented (Volume 2, Chapter 3; Volume 2, Chapter 11). Elizabeth seems as insecure in her status as Mrs. Elton, who cannot mention her brother-in-law’s barouche-landau often enough (the over-precision of the carriage’s description is akin to contemporary brand-name-dropping by status-seekers: “I’m going to the store” becomes “I’m taking the Audi to Whole Foods”). We expect such behavior of Mrs. Elton—who is nothing if not a social climber—but the Elliots are already well up the ladder by birth.

TS: Absolutely—and, in a similar vein, there’s something dispiritingly arriviste about the General’s attempts to impress Catherine with his gardens and his “tolerably large eating room.” He seems to mount a whole production for Catherine’s benefit, a sort of parody of rural conspicuous consumption. He draws her attention to every detail, from the humble (but of course well-designed) offices to the latest in Staffordshire breakfast services, (albeit “quite an old set, purchased two years ago”). It’s worth noting that even Mrs. John Dashwood recognizes the superiority of her mother-in-law’s antique breakfast china, but the General is always after the next, shiniest thing, including Catherine. The General is especially complacent when he gives Catherine the tour of his succession houses, the little hothouses fastidiously maintained at different temperatures (Volume 2, Chapter 8; Volume 2, Chapter 7, Sense and Sensibility, Volume 1, Chapter 2).

Here, I keep thinking of that brilliant Raymond Chandler scene in the hothouse, from The Big Sleep, where Philip Marlowe goes to meet another general, General Sternwood; the General complains that orchids are “Nasty things! Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.” And it strikes me that General Tilney would very much like to keep Catherine safely potted in his house, at a resting temperature of his choosing, another ornament fitting the greatness of his family pile.

DJK: Great comparison! “[T]he rotten sweetness of corruption” seems particularly appropriate, from a Persuasion point of view, when I consider Mrs. Clay—whose surname is “like the flesh of men,” in fact.

When Lady Dalrymple and the Honourable Miss Carteret arrive in Bath and condescend to notice the Elliots, the family’s toadying behavior shocks Anne:

Anne was ashamed. Had Lady Dalrymple and her daughter even been very agreeable, she would still have been ashamed of the agitation they created, but they were nothing. There was no superiority of manner, accomplishment, or understanding.

Anne goes so far in this instance as to discuss her real feelings on the subject with Mr. Elliot:

“I certainly do think there has been by far too much trouble taken to procure the acquaintance. I suppose (smiling) I have more pride than any of you; but I confess it does vex me, that we should be so solicitous to have the relationship acknowledged.” (Volume 2, Chapter 4)

In Persuasion, the truly “superior” people regardless of class are superior in understanding, self-knowledge, and basic good-heartedness: people like the Musgroves senior, or the Crofts, or the impoverished Mrs. Smith, all of whom seem comfortable in their identities. Even Anne’s god-mother, her late mother’s close friend Lady Russell, betrays too much consciousness of her inferiority as “the widow of only a knight”; her “prejudices on the side of ancestry” affect her judgment of Mr. Elliot and her early advice to Anne about Frederick Wentworth (Volume 1, Chapter 1). Fortunately, in the eight years since Anne last followed that advice, she has learned to trust her own better judgment. In fact, Anne’s shift in confidential conversation toward the novel’s end from Lady Russell to Mrs. Smith can be seen to mark another shift in the novel’s treatment of class. Even though she engages in somewhat vulgar gossip, a means of communication she herself compares, in no way apologetically, to a sewer, Mrs. Smith shows more true gentility than her purported social superiors, like Elizabeth Elliot. It is telling to recall Elizabeth’s first, prompt proposal about how the family could try to pay its debts (or at least somehow “retrench”): “to cut off some unnecessary charities” (Volume 2, Chapter 9; Volume 1, Chapter 1). Compare Mrs. Smith, so straitened in her own circumstances: Nurse Rooke has seen the patient through some of the worst of her rheumatic complaint:

“As soon as I could use my hands, she taught me to knit, which has been a great amusement; and she put me in the way of making these little thread-cases, pincushions and card-racks, which you always find me so busy about, and which supply me with the means of doing a little good to one or two very poor families in this neighborhood.” (Volume 2, Chapter 5)

Elizabeth’s abandonment of the lady-of-the-manor’s charitable role reminds me of Mrs. John Dashwood’s petty undercutting of her husband’s intended generosity to his step-mother and half-sisters (with her unforgettable proverb, “’people always live forever when there is any annuity to be paid them’”), even as she seeks the add the latest thing to the Norland estate: a greenhouse (Sense and Sensibility, Volume 1, Chapter 2; Volume 2, Chapter 11). Mrs. Smith’s generosity to those more desperately poor than she (and Nurse Rooke’s shrewd use of occupational therapy for her patient!) show true superiority.

TS: Yes indeed—and in a similar vein, General Tilney’s overweening kindness toward Catherine (insisting, for example, that the Woodston cottage not be pulled down—because Catherine admires it [Volume 2, Chapter 11]) promptly devolves into deep cruelty, once he discovers that she is not the heiress that he’d convinced himself she was. It’s another one of those princesses-turned-out-of-the-castle moments that we associate with fairytales, but which Austen consistently anchors in day-to-day realism (Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park). The General, then, does a supremely cowardly and ungentlemanly thing, using his daughter as a cutout, compelling Eleanor to hasten Catherine out of the house, on the long journey back to her home, alone and without even pocket-money, until Eleanor delicately offers, and Catherine delicately accepts, a small sum to see her on her way.

The General’s meanness—in turning her out; in not providing for her journey; in refusing to write to her himself—is, as his son will later correctly charge, not at all in the character of a gentleman; this bit qualifies less as a class reversal than a basic betrayal of the decency with which the patrician class likes to associate itself. Hearing the story once Catherine returns to Fullerton, her family agrees that “it was a strange business, and that he was a strange man″—the euphemisms that decent people use when talking about indecent ones, however much richer the indecent ones might be.

Of course, Catherine’s mother soon begins to suspect that her daughter’s homecoming malaise is the result of having been raised too high, and recommends wholesome reading to bring Catherine back down to earth: assuming that Catherine, from her time at Bath and then at Northanger, has become addicted to “grand” French bread, Mrs. Morland remarks that “’There is a very clever Essay in one of the books up stairs upon much such a subject, about young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance …. I am sure it will do you good’″ (Volume 2, Chapter 15).

Much like the General, Catherine’s mother begins by believing that her daughter has been seduced by the prospect of wealth and high company, rather than her simply having fallen in love with a modest clergyman. Distrust of graspingness or class aspiration is not limited to the wealthy; and often the more precarious members of the middle class can be quite as suspicious of social climbers as any General Tilney.

Quotations are from the Cambridge editions of Persuasion, edited and with an introduction by Janet Todd and Antje Blank (2006), Pride and Prejudice, edited and with an introduction by Pat Rogers (2006), Mansfield Park, edited and with an introduction by John Wiltshire (2005), Emma, edited and with an introduction by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan (2005), and Sense and Sensibility, edited and with an introduction by Edward Copeland (2006).

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If you’re interested in the Jane Austen summer camp Ted talks about in his book Camp Austen, you can find more information here: “Northanger Abbey & Frankenstein: 200 Years of Horror,” June 14-17, 2018.

Fifteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.”  Coming soon: Deborah Barnum’s guest post on the publishing history of Persuasion.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Saniyya Gauhar, Mahlia S. Lone, and Laaleen Sukhera are members of the Jane Austen Society of Pakistan (JASP) and contributors to a collection of stories entitled Austenistan, which was published last year by Bloomsbury India and will be published in the UK next month. Amanda Foreman calls Austenistan “a clever, contemporary take on Jane Austen’s work,” Moni Mohsin calls it “Austen with garam masala,” and Rebecca Smith calls the stories “light, bright and sparkling”—she says she “smiled all the way through” the book. “Just as in Austen’s novels,” Smith writes, “we see heroines struggling to control their own destinies instead of being pushed onto the marriage market.”

When I invited Laaleen to contribute to my blog series “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,” she asked if she could collaborate with other members of JASP. Of course I said yes. It’s my pleasure to introduce this co-authored guest post on Eleanor Tilney and Isabella Thorpe by Saniyya, Mahlia, and Laaleen.

Saniyya, Laaleen, and Mahlia

Saniyya Gauhar is a freelance writer and editor. She graduated from Sussex University and she has worked in corporate law and litigation in London and Pakistan. She was a founding member of JASP. Her contribution to Austenistan is called “The Mughal Empire.”

Saniyya Gauhar

Saniyya: In Regency society, it was unseemly for women of the upper and middle classes to work and earn a living. For such women, there were two main ways that financial security was assured—they either had to be born into money (like Eleanor Tilney) or marry into it (as Isabella Thorpe aspires to do). This resulted in a society that was obsessed with marriage primarily for material gain and because it was the only “career path” available to women, the matrimonial market was a cut-throat, competitive, social minefield. But the hypocrisy of it all was that it was social suicide for a woman to be seen to want money lest she be branded a gold digger. A woman had to cultivate an aura of innocence, professing to value love and not money. Isabella Thorpe has to tread this minefield, and coming as she does from a humble background, for her the stakes are high. Her main ambition is to marry a rich man—but not to be seen to be doing so. As a result, she comes across as disingenuous, artificial and inconsistent in her words and actions.

She says what society expects: “My wishes are so moderate that the smallest income in nature would be enough for me” (Volume 1, Chapter 15). However, at other moments, she is more practical: “it is not a trifle that will support a family nowadays; and after all that romancers may say, there is no doing without money” (Volume 2, Chapter 3). It is this quest for a grander match that makes her throw caution to the wind by allowing herself to be seduced by Captain Tilney, the heir to Northanger Abbey, thereby jeopardizing her engagement to James Morland, who has “only” four hundred pounds a year. The gamble fails as Tilney discards Isabella and Morland breaks their engagement. Isabella pays a hefty price for her ambitions.

Eleanor Tilney, on the other hand, is a much more balanced, wise and composed character. She is not desperate to marry for money. Nevertheless, her father, the mercenary General Tilney, is determined she must marry a rich man and he blocks Eleanor’s marriage to the man she is in love with. It is only when that same man becomes a viscount that he allows it.

Mahlia S. Lone’s contribution to Austenistan is called “The Fabulous Banker Boys.” She’s a textile journalist and the editor of GoodTimes magazine in Lahore, Pakistan. She also contributes to WWD (Women’s Wear Daily) and other publications. She attended Kinnaird College in Lahore, William Smith College in New York, and Clark University in Massachusetts.

Mahlia S. Lone

Mahlia: Without the requisite pound sterling, polite society cannot exist and a poor person almost gets denigrated to a position of ridicule. In Northanger Abbey, the three sets of sibling relationships contrast with each other in circumstances as well as manners, personality, and behaviour. While the Tilneys and Thorpes are on either end of the spectrum, the Morlands are in the middle, getting further away from the Thorpes and closer to the Tilneys as the novel progresses. This is just as society expects them to behave, but instead of following conventional societal rules, the Morlands come to this conclusion on their own.

The Thorpes live on the fringes of society. They are “on the make.” No one knows exactly where they come from and they haven’t much money to live on. Isabella uses her wiles to ensnare as eligible a match as she can, but in her overconfidence breaks her engagement with the faithful James Morland when she thinks she can get the more eligible Captain Tilney. However, blinded by ambition and greed, she gets seduced and discarded by the hardened, rakish military man. At the end of the novel, she is poor, disgraced and shunned by polite society, even by sweet, innocent Catherine Morland.

Eleanor Tilney’s situation is the complete opposite of Isabella’s. She comes from a distinguished family with a comfortable wealthy background and was brought up in stately Northanger Abbey. Her position in society is secure and she doesn’t have to scramble for position or marry for fortune. She has nothing to prove to anyone. Austen portrays her as the quintessential Gothic romance heroine who marries a lord at the end of the novel. They are both foils to Catherine’s character. As Catherine gets closer to the more mature Eleanor, she distances herself from the more unsteady Isabella. Catherine’s character evolves and mirrors this shift as she goes from being an inexperienced, highly excitable country girl to becoming a sensible, morally upright and resolute young lady.

Laaleen Sukhera is the editor of Austenistan and the story she contributed to the volume is called “On The Verge.” She has an MSc in Professional Communications and a BA in Screen Studies and Communication and Culture from Clark University in Massachusetts. She’s a communications consultant and writer, and she was the founder of JASP. You can find her on Twitter @laaleen and on Instagram @laaleen_official.

Laaleen Sukhera

Laaleen: Money and societal expectations go hand in hand in Northanger Abbey, a Regency era practicality that was not often accompanied by romantic love. Catherine Morland has two very different friendships in the course of the novel. She is immediately drawn to the vivacious and somewhat unscrupulous Isabella Thorpe, who is from an unremarkable family. Isabella becomes affianced to Catherine’s brother James when she assumes he has money—and then she encourages her brother John to marry James’s sister Catherine. She acquaints the reader with the qualities of the more arch Regency maiden and proves to be Catherine’s “frenemy.” Her coy behaviour provides a foil to Catherine’s comparative naiveté. Her fall from grace occurs when she sets her cap for someone too high up the social ladder—Captain Frederick Tilney, the heir to Northanger Abbey has no intention of marrying her after toying with her. By the end of the novel, even James Morland with his modest income is beyond her reach.

Higher up the social ladder, Eleanor Tilney is sensible, respectable, and far more eligible. Catherine admires Henry’s sister a great deal and seeks her approval, growing closer to her as she moves away from Isabella. Eleanor herself is not immune to the charms of romantic love. She defies her ferocious father General Tilney with a quiet determination when her proposed match earns his disapproval. However, all this changes when her suitor inherits a title and estate and the General is delighted that his daughter will be a viscountess.

Quotations are from the online edition of Northanger Abbey at Mollands.net.

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Fourteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: next week’s post, by Deborah Knuth Klenck and Ted Scheinman, will focus on both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

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Lyn Bennett is an associate professor of English at Dalhousie University, and her most recent book is Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Woman Writer, 1600-1700 (Cambridge UP, 2018). Her current research focuses on the self-fashioning rhetoric of the professions and, in collaboration with Edith Snook of the University of New Brunswick, on the circulation and production of recipes in early modern Atlantic Canada. She’s also the author of Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth and Lanyer (Duquesne UP, 2004), and her work appears in publications as diverse as Christianity and Literature, Genre, and the Journal of Medical Humanities.

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In 2014, in the first guest post for the first blog series I hosted, Lyn analyzed the complexities of the opening paragraph of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. It’s a pleasure to welcome her back with today’s guest post on Northanger Abbey.

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Northanger Abbey’s happy ending, as Sara Malton wrote here last week, hinges on the understanding that “even the slightest of texts . . . may have far more historical import than literally meets the eye.” Catherine Morland’s worldview and her expectations, Northanger Abbey makes clear, are very much shaped by the Gothic novels she adores. Influenced especially by Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, our heroine’s fruitful imagination runs free at the Abbey, where she persuades herself that the General, her host and prospective father-in-law, had actually murdered his long-dead wife. It is for this reason, Catherine wrongly infers, that she is suddenly sent unaccompanied home to Fullerton—as much as the novel’s action is precipitated by reading, it is driven also by misreading.

What Catherine does not yet understand is that she is sent packing not because of the story wrought by her over-stimulated imagination, but because of a fiction spoken about her. As Catherine later learns, her unceremonious expulsion had naught to do with her own offense but the General’s discovery that the fortune ascribed to her by the once-hopeful John Thorpe was a fantasy of his making. The damage wrought by boastful braggadocio, Austen makes clear, inflicts not only the self-important and aspirational Thorpe, the “boorish, inattentive reader whose crude nature,” Claire Grogan writes, “is made apparent by his preference for Matthew Lewis’s The Monk” (Introduction to the Broadview edition). It is, we later learn, Thorpe’s tall tale of Catherine’s fortune that misled the General to proceed on “such intelligence” without question. As it turns out, the General is an equally an undiscerning reader: about the intelligence gleaned on Catherine, we are told, “never had it occurred to him to doubt its authority.” A rational and reasonable doubt would, one suspects, have tempered the General’s angry response to the unraveling of a fiction his ambition wished to believe, Catherine “guilty only of being less rich than he had supposed her to be.” Instead, his recognition of faith misplaced in “false calculations” and the resulting belief that Catherine’s “necessitous family” constituted “a forward, bragging, scheming race” who aimed “to better themselves by wealthy connexions” propel him into a rage that proves shockingly uncivil (Chapter 30).

In Henry Tilney, however, Catherine finds a reader more discerning that the lying Thorpe or the too-credulous General. On the walk round Beechen Cliff with the Tilney siblings, Catherine learns that Henry shares something of her own taste in reading. Contrary to her expectations, Henry does not disparage the novel in favour of the “better books” Austen’s heroine supposes him to read in her belief that “young men despised novels amazingly.” On the contrary, Henry defends the often-maligned genre, pronouncing that anyone “who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” The operative word here is “good,” and Henry turns out to be a keen reader of the novelist Catherine so admires. Not only has he “read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works,” he tells his appreciative listener, but he has done so “with great pleasure.” The novel that fuels Catherine’s imaginative fancies during her visit to Northanger seems equally admired by Henry who, having “once begun” The Mysteries of Udolpho, he tells her, the novel he “could not lay down again,” and he was compelled to finish the book in a mere “two days.” It is telling that he also did so most sympathetically, responding, as the attentive reader should, with his “hair standing on end the whole time” and sharing much of it aloud with his sister (Chapter 14).

Sympatico they may be, but Henry’s reading ventures beyond Catherine’s. The history that he is fond of, Catherine complains, she takes up “only as a duty.” Lacking the excitement of the novels she prefers, history offers “nothing that does not either vex or weary.” Androcentric and political, history centres on “The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences,” featuring men who are “good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.” All this, Catherine concludes, “is very tiresome.” Yet Catherine also understands that her impatience with history books denies who she is as a reader: “I often think it odd,” she elaborates, “that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.” Recognizing that novels and histories are in some ways not so different, Catherine senses that her distaste for written history is misplaced and contradictory. She does know that the writing of history is to some degree imaginative, and that “The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs” are equally the product of “invention.” And invention, she concludes, “is what delights me in other books” (Chapter 14).

Invention is, of course, the first of rhetoric’s five canons, that which Aristotle describes as “finding the available means of persuasion.” Not to be confused with fabrication, invention is the process of discovering how best to represent the truth one wishes to impart, the persuasive means as crucial to the writing of history as it is to the writing of fiction. For Henry, persuasion depends not on the ingenuity of invention, but on the accuracy he insists upon and for which Eleanor chastises him:

“Henry,” said Miss Tilney, “you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is forever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word ‘nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.” (Chapter 14)

Invoking Hugh Blair along with Samuel Johnson, Eleanor complains that her brother’s preoccupation with linguistic precision renders him overly fastidious—or too “nice” in the more precise parlance of an earlier age.

Dr. Johnson is, of course, the author of a famous dictionary and an influential literary critic. Less famous than his contemporary, Blair was in his day well known as the author of the enduringly popular Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Tellingly, Blair is of Henry’s mind in insisting that the first aim of language is accuracy. For Blair, meaning must be illuminated and not obfuscated by the judicious employment of rhetoric’s third canon, and style must not ornament but accurately represent. Plainer is therefore better, Blair argues, for “the richest ornaments of Style only glimmer through the dark and puzzle” when the aim should be “to make our meaning clearly and fully understood” and “without the least difficulty” (Lecture 10). A straight shooter with a low tolerance for obfuscation, obscurity, and imprecision, Henry admires Blair and equally disdains the undisciplined imaginings that prompted his sister to infer that the “expected horrors in London” he discusses with Catherine refer not “to a circulating library” but to insurrection and riot (Chapter 14).

Catherine, Eleanor, and the General are notable mis-readers of texts spoken and written. Henry, who eventually sets all to right, seems to offer a corrective, or at least a counter-balance to the hasty and fanciful inferences of the others. Yet Henry is not exempt from Austen’s readerly critique. It may be that Henry also errs in his unyielding attachment to clear and fixed meaning—and not only in his resistance to the various nuances of an evolving and unfixed “nice.” Upon learning the reason for his father’s change of heart toward Miss Morland, Henry is not dissuaded from his pursuit but instead “sustained in his purpose by a conviction of its justice.” Truth be told, though,

He felt himself bound as much in honour as in affection to Miss Morland, and believing that heart to be his own which he had been directed to gain, no unworthy retraction of a tacit consent, no reversing decree of unjustifiable anger, could shake his fidelity, or influence the resolutions it prompted.

Austen may give us the comic ending we expect, but Henry’s rigid attachment to an ideal of “honour” that at least matches his “affection” lends more than a hint of irony to the narrator’s insistence that “My own joy on the occasion is very sincere” (Chapter 31). With the happy resolution of a plot predicated on misreading—and where the whole truth turns out to be nebulous and complex—Austen leaves us wondering whether we have, indeed, read aright.

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Quotations are from the Broadview edition of Northanger Abbey, edited and with an introduction by Clare Grogan, and the Eighteenth Century Collections Online edition of Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belle Lettres (1783).

Thirteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Laaleen Sukhera, Dan Macey, Deborah Knuth Klenck, and Ted Scheinman.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

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Sara Malton is the author of Forgery in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture: Fictions of Finance from Dickens to Wilde (2009), and her work has appeared in such journals as Nineteenth-Century Studies, Studies in the Novel, Victorian Literature and Culture, the European Romantic Review, and English Studies in Canada. She’s a past Trustee of the Dickens Society, and she hosted the 20th Annual Dickens Society Symposium in Halifax, Nova Scotia, July 8-10, 2015.[image error]She wrote a guest post on “Refashioning Memory” for the blog series I hosted a few years ago in honour of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and I’m very happy that she agreed to contribute to my current series, “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.” Today’s post is excerpted from her article “‘The Visions of Romance Were Over’: Recollections of a Golden Past in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey,” published in 2017 in Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature, edited by Goran Stanivukovic (317-37), and reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher, McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Sara is an Associate Professor in the  Department of English at Saint Mary’s University  where she specializes in nineteenth-century literature. After receiving her PhD in English from the University of Toronto in 2004, she went on to a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at  Cornell University . She joined the Department of English at Saint Mary’s in 2005.

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Two crucial texts bookend Northanger Abbey: Thomas Moss’s poem, “The Beggar’s Petition” (1769) and the “manuscript” (or laundry list, as it turns out) accidentally left behind by Eleanor Tilney’s romantic interest. However mundane, the latter, by contrast to the former, tells a tale of economic inclusion—it is an index to ownership, property, and social hierarchy. Yet, taken together, both texts ultimately return us from the financial realm to the realm of romance.

It is in reference to the “Beggar’s Petition,” a well-known ballad often used in recitation lessons, that we first learn of Catherine’s limited powers of recollection, for “Her mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat” this single poem, and even her younger sister, Sally, could recite it more successfully (Volume 1, Chapter 1). While this seems a playful enough satire on the typical “heroine’s” education, the narrator is careful to underscore the ways that women’s very lives are shaped by the texts they are taught to memorize and memorialize. For as Catherine grew, she “read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives” (Volume 1, Chapter 1). Of course the life of a typical young woman will normally be far from eventful; it is thus little wonder that the golden world of Northanger, with its enchantment and mystery, is so alluring for Catherine.

Yet Northanger Abbey ultimately proves hardly possessed of the gold of the integral kind, but is instead a world of illusion. Once more, a wondrous world of possibility merely covers over the quotidian, textual, financial realm. Turning to Catherine in her chamber at Northanger, we find her before the

high, old-fashioned black cabinet, though in a situation conspicuous enough [that] had never caught her notice before. . . . though there could be nothing really in it, there was something whimsical, it was certainly a very remarkable coincidence! It was not absolutely ebony and gold; but it was Japan, black and yellow Japan of the handsomest kind; and as she held her candle, the yellow had very much the effect of gold. (Volume 2, Chapter 6)

Three times (three that magical number of romance) Catherine must try the key before she can open the cabinet (whose various empty drawers render it as much an empty cash register as a repository of exquisite secrets). Therein she at last finds “a roll of paper,” “the precious manuscript” (Volume 2, Chapter 6). In this manuscript matters of fortune and fact miraculously converge; such a convergence informs the very language of Austen’s free indirect discourse here, as Catherine ponders over “The manuscript so wonderfully found, so wonderfully accomplishing the morning’s prediction,” and marvels, “how was it to be accounted for?” (Volume 2, Chapter 6; my emphasis).

To Catherine’s great disappointment, the manuscript has far more to do with matters of accountancy than she would have imagined. While she hopes it will grant her access to a gothic past, it proves merely a record of very recent, very dry domestic history: “for the roll, seeming to consist entirely of small disjointed sheets, was altogether but of trifling size and much less than she had supposed to it to be at first. . . . An inventory of linen, in coarse and modern characters, seemed all that was before her! If the evidence of sight might be trusted, she held a washing-bill in her hand” (Volume 2, Chapter 7). There are but four further such bills, along with a receipt for hair powder and soap, and a farrier’s bill. Such records of plain, objective fact serve as a humiliating counter to Catherine’s desire to uncover a vivid history long concealed.

For there are, then, no dirty secrets here, apart from that daily grime of which a male consumer has had to rid himself, its costs documented in but “coarse and modern characters.” This description echoes the narrator’s earlier characterization of the kind of writing one finds in such publications as the Spectator. Both sorts of texts are but mere inventories of the pedestrian. The laundry list and inventories of consumer goods should remind Catherine of the everyday domestic realities that were actually to be found in the Abbey, where, to her great disappointment, “The furniture was in all the profusion and elegance of modern taste” (Volume 2, Chapter 5).

That the manuscripts are but records of laundering or “whitewashing,” we might say, signals how such texts provocatively concentrate the multiple concerns of what I would term Austen’s financial romance. For, as the OED tells us, the verb to whitewash means not only “to make a fabric lighter or whiter; to bleach,” or “to cover or coat a wall or building with whitewash,” but also, in the sense that we now may more readily assume, the act of rewriting or tempering a history, as in “to conceal the faults or errors of; to free from blame.” Yet there is an additional meaning of the term that, although now rare, notably emerged in the late-eighteenth century and underscores the crucial role these washing bills play in the romantic and financial resolution of Catherine’s plot: in 1761 “to whitewash” was first noted as meaning “to clear (a person) from liability for his or her debts, especially by judicial declaration of bankruptcy; to write off (a debt, etc.).” An 1819 issue of Sporting Magazine, for instance, reports on “Two baronets’ sons pleading to be white-washed, but remanded for frauds toward their creditors.”

Ironically for readers, in retrospect we come to realize the importance of such texts and their place in remedying any liabilities in Catherine’s financial history and in securing her profitable romantic and financial future. As it turns out, this “laundry list” in fact bears far more than the residue of dull domestic dealings, but both contains a trace of Eleanor’s romantic history and anticipates the novel’s romantic conclusion—it has far more, therefore, to do with Catherine’s fate than she realizes. As Mary Poovey argues with regard to Austen’s fiction, “by making the money plot first disrupt, then be absorbed by the domestic plot, Austen translates a monetary debt into mutual love” (Genres of the Credit Economy [2008]). So it is here. The “man of fortune and consequence” (Volume 2, Chapter 16) who rather magically transforms Eleanor into his Viscountess at the novel’s conclusion is not a fictitious Byronic hero, but a “real” man possessed of his share of dirty laundry. This man, the narrator reveals, “was the very gentleman whose negligent servant left behind him that collection of washing-bills, resulting from a long visit at Northanger, by which my heroine was involved in one of her most alarming adventures” (Volume 2, Chapter 16).

As well as a record of domestic accounts, the list reminds us of what greatly informs the basis of marriage: matters financial, domestic, and, often, pedestrian. Our narrator knows what our heroine does not—that the seemingly slightest of texts (rather like Austen’s own domestic fiction, her self-proclaimed “little bit . . . of ivory on which [she] work[s] with so fine a brush” [December 1816]) and indeed, those bound up with both domestic matters and matters of the heart, may have far more historical import than literally meets the eye. In this manner the novel argues for the way that apparently trivial, marginal texts of the past in fact form a significant part of the historical record. The laundry list’s significance tells us that history is only superficially a tale of men’s financial transactions. Simultaneously it is much more. Austen’s trivial texts underscore the prominence of the financial record, yet also illustrate that those domestic concerns largely occluded from dominant narratives of history are in fact absolutely fundamental to its realization.

We recall that only Eleanor remembers that Catherine may have insufficient funds to see her through her journey away from the Abbey; this crucial moment of female financial guardianship recurs in the novel’s conclusion when Eleanor’s prosperous marriage sufficiently assuages her father’s temper in order for him to submit to the union between Henry and Catherine. Indeed, the violent intrusion of the economic in Northanger Abbey’s world of romance and enchantment is countered by the very intrusion that finally concludes it: Henry’s visit to Catherine at Fullerton. Recalling the frequent compression characteristic of Austen’s endings, such as that of Sense and Sensibility, the dashing hero’s arrival at the heroine’s humbler abode dramatizes the leveling process that the novel’s marital conclusion will in part bring about. Giving the last word, thus, to romance, the power of the landed Viscount trumps the evil actions of the General. Of course, in a final irony, this apparent triumph of conservatism enables the violation of conventional class-based relations—the “filial disobedience” (Volume 2, Chapter 16) that the young couple’s union represents. Like them, readers of Austen—and the realist novel to come—are certainly all the richer for the romance.

Quotations are from the Oxford edition of Northanger Abbey, edited by James Kinsley and John Davie and with an introduction by Claudia L. Johnson (2003), and the Oxford edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye (4th edition, 2011).

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Twelfth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Kim Wilson, Dan Macey, and Laaleen Sukhera.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

I was hoping Margaret C. Sullivan would write about Henry Tilney for my blog series celebrating 200 years of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and I’m delighted that she said yes. Maggie is the author of The Jane Austen Handbook and Jane Austen Cover to Cover and she has contributed to the anthologies Jane Austen Made Me Do It and The Joy of Jane. For my blog series “Emma in the Snow” she wrote about “Miss Bates in Fairy-land,” and for my Mansfield Park series she analyzed “The Manipulations of Henry and Mary Crawford.”

She is the Editrix of AustenBlog.com and the creator of Mollands.net. She spends her days as the web content manager for a large international law firm and her evenings “watching ‘base ball’ and thinking up adventures for Henry and Catherine that I swear I will write someday.”

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Thank you to Sarah for her invitation to participate in this online event, and the opportunity to discuss my favorite Jane Austen character, and even defend him against what I consider to be mistaken impressions. (And we always want to guard against first, ill-considered impressions, don’t we, Janeites?)

There is a persistent idea that I often hear and read about Henry Tilney: that he lectures Catherine Morland, that he is condescending to her, even in some more extreme statements that he is an example of toxic masculinity. This of course is nonsense; nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Henry empowers Catherine to learn to trust her own very good instincts. He sees the generosity and goodness of her heart early on. In fact, I think that is what makes him fall in love with her, along with, as the Authoress herself points out, that Catherine so obviously likes him, but that is a subject for another essay.

I know that many reading this, knowing me as the internet’s premier defender of Da Man (as I named Henry Tilney many years ago, because HE IS DA MAN), are rolling their eyes and saying, “There goes Mags off about Tilney again.” There is, perhaps, a suspicion that I might be a trifle biased. But I have thought about this subject, paraphrasing another Austen hero, more than most women, and I have no reason to reverse my original position on Mr. Tilney. He is Jane Austen’s wittiest, most intelligent, best-read, and most delightful hero, and he is entirely sympathetic to women. He is a wonderful brother, and I think will be a wonderful husband, too. Much of the expression of my Tilney-love online might be a trifle tongue-in-cheek, but my sincere admiration for Henry Tilney that started on my first read of Northanger Abbey has continued to this day more than twenty years later. (And I didn’t admire Catherine Morland at all at first—I thought the delightful Henry could do so much better—but I’ve come to love her as Henry himself has, by seeing her through his eyes.)

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As an example of this widespread misunderstanding about Henry Tilney, I’d like to discuss the scene in which Henry encounters Catherine exiting his mother’s room at Northanger Abbey, which happens in Volume 2, Chapter 9.

Many interpretations of this scene portray Henry as angry and hectoring. The film versions of the novel may lead to this perception. In the 1980s BBC version, Henry (Peter Firth) enters his mother’s room waving a riding crop and pointing at Catherine (Katharine Schlesinger) with it. As he says his lines, he advances on Catherine menacingly, nearly whispering his lines, backing her up; the camera is often on an extreme close-up of his face, his eyes wide, making him look a little scary.

In the more recent version from 2007, Henry (JJ Feild) also advances menacingly on Catherine (Felicity Jones), his mood ranging between anger and disbelief and back to anger again. For some of his lines, the point of view originates from behind Catherine, below her left ear, pointing up at Henry and making him seem taller and more menacing. In both cases, Henry is portrayed as a hovering, dangerous, dare I say Montonian, presence.

But I don’t see the scene that way. Let’s examine it. (Pray forgive the long passages—Jane Austen’s words convey the scenes better than any paraphrase.)

As soon as she enters the late Mrs. Tilney’s room, Catherine knows that her Gothic novel-fueled runaway imagination has steered her wrongly.

On tiptoe she entered; the room was before her; but it was some minutes before she could advance another step. She beheld what fixed her to the spot and agitated every feature.—She saw a large, well-proportioned apartment, an handsome dimity bed, arranged as unoccupied with an housemaid’s care, a bright Bath stove, mahogany wardrobes and neatly-painted chairs, on which the warm beams of a western sun gaily poured through two sash windows! Catherine had expected to have her feelings worked, and worked they were. Astonishment and doubt first seized them; and a shortly succeeding ray of common sense added some bitter emotions of shame. She could not be mistaken as to the room; but how grossly mistaken in everything else! … She was sick of exploring, and desired but to be safe in her own room, with her own heart only privy to its folly; and she was on the point of retreating as softly as she had entered, when the sound of footsteps, she could hardly tell where, made her pause and tremble. To be found there, even by a servant, would be unpleasant; but by the General, (and he seemed always at hand when least wanted,) much worse!—She listened—the sound had ceased; and resolving not to lose a moment, she passed through and closed the door. At that instant a door underneath was hastily opened; some one seemed with swift steps to ascend the stairs, by the head of which she had yet to pass before she could gain the gallery. She had no power to move. With a feeling of terror not very definable, she fixed her eyes on the staircase, and in a few moments it gave Henry to her view. “Mr. Tilney!” she exclaimed in a voice of more than common astonishment. He looked astonished too. “Good God!” she continued, not attending to his address, “how came you here?—how came you up that staircase?”

“How came I up that staircase!” he replied, greatly surprized. “Because it is my nearest way from the stable-yard to my own chamber; and why should I not come up it?”

Catherine recollected herself, blushed deeply, and could say no more. He seemed to be looking in her countenance for that explanation which her lips did not afford. …

“…My mother’s room is very commodious, is it not? Large and cheerful-looking, and the dressing closets so well disposed! It always strikes me as the most comfortable apartment in the house, and I rather wonder that Eleanor should not take it for her own. She sent you to look at it, I suppose?”

“No.”

“It has been your own doing entirely?”—Catherine said nothing—After a short silence, during which he had closely observed her, he added, “As there is nothing in the room in itself to raise curiosity, this must have proceeded from a sentiment of respect for my mother’s character, as described by Eleanor, which does honour to her memory. The world, I believe, never saw a better woman. But it is not often that virtue can boast an interest such as this. The domestic, unpretending merits of a person never known, do not often create that kind of fervent, venerating tenderness which would prompt a visit like yours. Eleanor, I suppose, has talked of her a great deal?”

“Yes, a great deal. That is—no, not much, but what she did say, was very interesting. Her dying so suddenly,” (slowly, and with hesitation it was spoken,) “and you—none of you being at home—and your father, I thought—perhaps had not been very fond of her.”

“And from these circumstances,” he replied (his quick eye fixed on her’s), “you infer perhaps the probability of some negligence—some—(involuntarily she shook her head)—or it may be—of something still less pardonable.” (Volume 2, Chapter 9)

“Good God! How came you up that staircase?” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)

Henry picks up pretty quickly what is going on. He knows Catherine’s enjoyment of Gothic novels, and his quick mind makes the connection between the romance of an ancient, though refurbished, abbey—indeed, he told Catherine a silly story on the way to Northanger based on that knowledge—and he realizes she has taken it too far.

Throughout the novel, when Catherine applies to Henry for knowledge, with her charming combination of naivete and lack of guile, he has employed the Socratic method with her. Instead of telling her what to think or do, he asks a series of questions designed to make her think for herself and learn to trust her instincts. Catherine does have good instincts—she initially dislikes John Thorpe, for example, but does not trust this feeling. He is her brother’s friend! He is Isabella’s brother! She, Catherine, must be wrong about him. Of course she is quite correct, but she hasn’t yet learned to trust her instincts. Henry seems to realize this, and attempts to help her grow and learn, to question that which should be questioned. (It is possible that he already has performed the same service for the self-possessed, mature Eleanor, who might not always have been that way.) He does the same in this scene.

“But your father,” said Catherine, “was he afflicted?”

“For a time, greatly so. You have erred in supposing him not attached to her. He loved her, I am persuaded, as well as it was possible for him to—We have not all, you know, the same tenderness of disposition—and I will not pretend to say that while she lived, she might not often have had much to bear, but though his temper injured her, his judgment never did. His value of her was sincere; and, if not permanently, he was truly afflicted by her death.” (Volume 2, Chapter 9)

Here, Henry is imparting facts to Catherine. That is different from lecturing, and his tone is matter-of-fact. He even admits, knowing that Catherine has spent time with General Tilney, that the General lacks “tenderness of disposition.” He does not attempt to deny something she has had the opportunity to observe for herself. To do so certainly would have been condescending.

“I am very glad of it,” said Catherine; “it would have been very shocking!”—

“If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you—Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?” (Volume 2, Chapter 9)

He knows what she is implying, and he is surprised, certainly. Is he angry? Perhaps a little, but I don’t get a sense of that from the paragraph above, and he is definitely not menacing or malicious. Henry does not lecture Catherine. He encourages her to use her common sense and her good instincts, which he knows she has, to look into her heart and understand the truth. He points out that they are not characters in one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels—”Remember that we are English, that we are Christians”—by which he means Protestants, of course, rather than the French and Italian Roman Catholics who people The Mysteries of Udolpho, whose religion, from a good Protestant viewpoint, contains elements of superstition that a reasonable person would not entertain (a viewpoint Mrs. Radcliffe herself would have supported).

They had reached the end of the gallery; and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room. (Volume 2, Chapter 9)

I suspect this is where many readers get their annoyance with Henry. He yelled at her and made her cry! No, not really. He does not yell, or lecture, or hector. He is gentle. He calls her Dearest Miss Morland. Catherine is not crying because Henry is mad at her. She is crying because she is ashamed of herself. “Tears of shame.” It’s right in the text, as are so many things with Jane Austen when you look for them.

A Signet Classic edition from the 2010s.

But don’t just take my word for it. A real history and literature scholar has written most eloquently about this scene and offered a tremendous analysis. In her essay “The Rev. Henry Tilney, Rector of Woodston” (Persuasions 20 [1998]), Irene Collins writes of Henry Tilney as an Anglican priest. (Something else people think about Henry Tilney is that he is a lousy priest. Go read that essay and be disabused of that notion forever.) Professor Collins was an expert on the Anglican clergy of Jane Austen’s time—her book Jane Austen and the Clergy is required reading for those seeking to understand the clergymen of Jane Austen’s novels, who are not a homogenous bunch at all. In this essay, she opines that in the scene from Northanger Abbey excerpted above, Henry is actually acting in his capacity as an Anglican priest by helping Catherine understand the “secret sin” she has committed. Jane Austen, in the prayers published after her death, asks for assistance with these secret sins. Prof. Collins writes,

Secret sins were described at some length by Jane Austen’s favorite sermon writer, Archbishop Thomas Sherlock. In a discourse entitled “On self-examination,” he listed them as “sins committed in ignorance, sins we have fallen into through habit, and sins we have simply forgotten.” Though seemingly trivial, they may have done harm to others without one’s knowledge; thinking ill of a fellow creature was particularly mentioned. Hence, Sherlock warned, “for every idle word, how soon soever it slips from our memory, for every vain imagination of the heart, how soon soever it vanishes away, we shall give an account on the day of judgement” (Knox 276-80). To avoid so serious a climax we should review our conduct at the end of each day and ask God to forgive whatever he had seen amiss in it. Jane Austen clearly took this advice to heart. In each of the prayers she wrote for family use at Chawton, there are petitions asking God’s forgiveness for secret sins. Indeed, they are the only kind of sin she mentions.

This certainly applies to Catherine’s “sin” against General Tilney, of considering him a possible murderer or wife-abuser. The Anglican church had done away with confession before a priest, as Prof. Collins’ essay points out, but confession as a private conference with God was important, and the steps remain the same: examine your conscience, understand you have sinned, repent the sin, and promise to sin no more, upon which the sin is forgiven and removed from your spiritual permanent record. Henry, by asking Catherine a series of questions as he does, is assisting her to examine her conscience and understand her secret sin, which before encountering him she had already decided to forget about. He is acting as a good priest should.

The part of about repentance comes in Chapter 10. Well, it starts at the end of the scene already described, when Catherine runs away with tears of shame. Not tears of sorrow, because she thinks her chances with Henry are gone forever, though she does; not tears of terror because he berated her, because he didn’t; but tears of shame. In the following chapter, the narrator tells us,

The visions of romance were over. Catherine was completely awakened. Henry’s address, short as it had been, had more thoroughly opened her eyes to the extravagance of her late fancies than all their several disappointments had done. Most grievously was she humbled. Most bitterly did she cry. It was not only with herself that she was sunk—but with Henry. Her folly, which now seemed even criminal, was all exposed to him, and he must despise her forever. The liberty which her imagination had dared to take with the character of his father, could he ever forgive it? The absurdity of her curiosity and her fears, could they ever be forgotten? She hated herself more than she could express. (Volume 2, Chapter 10)

The conscience has been examined; the sin discovered, admitted, and repented; and she has determined to not commit the same sin again.

She did not learn either to forget or defend the past; but she learned to hope that it would never transpire farther, and that it might not cost her Henry’s entire regard. Her thoughts being still chiefly fixed on what she had with such causeless terror felt and done, nothing could shortly be clearer, than that it had been all a voluntary, self-created delusion, each trifling circumstance receiving importance from an imagination resolved on alarm, and every thing forced to bend to one purpose by a mind which, before she entered the Abbey, had been craving to be frightened. She remembered with what feelings she had prepared for a knowledge of Northanger. She saw that the infatuation had been created, the mischief settled long before her quitting Bath, and it seemed as if the whole might be traced to the influence of that sort of reading which she had there indulged. …

Her mind made up on these several points, and her resolution formed, of always judging and acting in future with the greatest good sense, she had nothing to do but to forgive herself and be happier than ever…. (Volume 2, Chapter 10)

Despite the narrator’s light tone, this is not a small point. This is Catherine’s “Till this moment, I never knew myself.” She is learning throughout the novel, but this is the biggest lesson she learns. And who has taught her—or, more properly, led her to enlightenment? Henry Tilney; who, by the way, lets Catherine know that her sin has been expunged and forgotten:

The formidable Henry soon followed her into the room, and the only difference in his behaviour to her was that he paid her rather more attention than usual. Catherine had never wanted comfort more, and he looked as if he was aware of it. … Henry’s astonishing generosity and nobleness of conduct, in never alluding in the slightest way to what had passed, was of the greatest assistance to her…. (Volume 2, Chapter 10)

The spiritual slate has been wiped clean. Go forth, Catherine, and sin no more.

I hope that the readers who have hung in there with this long essay will view Henry Tilney in future more generously, as Henry himself acted with Catherine Morland. As you re-read the novel, pay attention to his interactions with Catherine. They range from nonsensical semi-flirtation (when they first meet at the Lower Rooms) to big-brotherish teasing (the walk at Beechen Cliff) to concerned friend (when he advises her about her reservations about Isabella and Captain Tilney), and, so often, are in the form of an engaged series of questions, either to draw her out or to lead her to knowledge. He listens to her. That’s more than her own family and so-called friends ever do.

Henry pays Catherine the compliment of not dumbing down his conversation, and he does not condescend to her; indeed, I would say that Henry and his sister Eleanor are the only characters in Northanger Abbey who do not condescend to Catherine, or worse yet, attempt to hoodwink her. Though he often fills the role of a teacher, the only thing Henry lectures Catherine about is the picturesque. Unlike many other Janeites, I have no doubt that Henry and Catherine will have the happiest of marriages, and that he will not grow tired of her, especially as she blossoms under his care into a fully formed adult and develops the confidence that being thoroughly understood, loved, and appreciated gives every woman.

Quotations are from the Cambridge edition of Northanger Abbey, edited by Barbara M. Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye (2006).

A Penguin edition from the 1970s.

Eleventh in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Sara Malton, Kim Wilson, and Dan Macey.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Judith Thompson contributed a guest post on the adoption plot of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park for the blog series I hosted in 2014, and it’s my pleasure to introduce her guest post on Northanger Abbey for “Youth and Experience,” the series I’m hosting this year in honour of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Judith is General Secretary and archivist of the John Thelwall Society, and she’s a leader in the field of Thelwall Studies. Author of four books and editions by or about this romantic radical and polymath, as well as numerous articles and chapters, she’s currently writing the first full biography of Thelwall, as part of Raising Voices: The Legacy of Citizen John Thelwall, an archival-activist project that seeks to restore his lost legacy and connect his voice to communities that still struggle to realize the democratic rights and liberties for which he fought.

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Judith is Professor of Romantic Literature at Dalhousie University, and this year she’s on sabbatical. Earlier this week, she arrived in the Lake District for the Wordsworth Winter School. The photos she posted on Facebook were so lovely that I asked her if I could share a few of them here as well.

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“My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain. The confusion there is scandalous. Miss Morland has been talking of nothing more dreadful than a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three duodecimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in each, with a frontispiece to the first, of two tombstones and a lantern—do you understand?—And you, Miss Morland—my stupid sister has mistaken all your clearest expressions. You talked of expected horrors in London—and instead of instantly conceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such words could relate only to a circulating library, she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George’s Fields, the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the Twelfth Light Dragoons (the hopes of the nation) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents, and the gallant Captain Frederick Tilney, in the moment of charging at the head of his troop, knocked off his horse by a brickbat from an upper window. Forgive her stupidity. The fears of the sister have added to the weakness of the woman; but she is by no means a simpleton in general.” (Northanger Abbey, Volume 1, Chapter 14)

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This passage, in which Henry coolly corrects Catherine and Eleanor’s overheated imaginations by mansplaining the difference between reality and fiction, is one of my favorites in Northanger Abbey. This is not just because this episode so neatly encapsulates the conflicts at the heart of the novel, and Austen so cleverly outdoes Henry’s rather pushy, self-satisfied wit with her own quiet but much more complex and devastating irony. Rather, it is because the mention of riots in London makes it the best place in Austen’s corpus to enter a discussion about the nature and degree of Austen’s political consciousness and her engagement with one of the most revolutionary critical moments in literary history, which she is often accused of, or assumed to be, ignoring. These much-vexed debates have been rekindled lately with the publication of Helena Kelley’s much ballyhooed book on Jane Austen: The Secret Radical. As a specialist in romantic-era radicalism, currently at work on a biography of its most outspoken representative and hero, John Thelwall, I was eager to read her book, and see how its arguments for Austen’s secret radicalism might compare with my own. I was, shall we say, disappointed.

This is not the place for a full review of Kelley’s work, which has been critiqued by abler pens than mine. But like others, I suspect she has not only overlooked the already copious criticism on Austen and politics, but cannot have read the books carefully, since she pays absolutely no attention to this passage, which might have been a test case for her argument, and also seems unaware or uninterested in Austen’s irony, dismissing it as mere jokiness. In place of real, historically-, critically- and technically-informed analysis of radicalism, she substitutes a breathlessly superficial revelation of sexual symbolism (masturbation by the washing-chest, oh my!) in a tone that mimics Isabella’s prurient faux-naïveté, without the saving grace of Catherine’s sincerity. Despite her title, Kelley shows little awareness of the subtle and multiple forms that radicalism takes in the period, or the reasons why a woman in particular might have had recourse to secrecy in an age (like our own) of ideological binaries that forced many intelligent thinkers into silence (clue: it’s not all about sex).

Leaving Kelley behind, then, let me look more closely at this passage. And notice, as anyone with any sense of history and awareness of Austen’s irony must understand, that Eleanor and Catherine are NOT at all wrong or naïve to be worried about civil and military upheaval in London. On the contrary, at the time of the novel’s original composition, as well as of its publication 20 years later, such worries were realistic and widespread, whichever political stripe one might wear. In 1798, under the threat of French invasion, naval mutinies, rebellion in Ireland, crackdowns on political dissent and the widespread use of spies and informers, the nation had riot on the brain, and the government might be said to have survived by cultivating it; in 1817, in the wake of the Spa Fields Riots and the Pentrich rising, and just before Peterloo, visions of mobs attacking, banks attacked and city streets flowing with the blood of insurgents and dragoons alike were matters for daily discussion in the morning newspaper. It is not Catherine and Eleanor, but Henry, who is being naïve. Or is he? After all, it was Henry who introduced the idea of politics in the first place, immediately before this passage; the discussion on their walk having descended from the picturesque possibilities of “a withered oak … to oaks in general, to forests, the inclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands, and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence.” That silence is broken by Catherine, who merely picks up the same topic by introducing rumours of what might occur in London. In the discussion that follows Eleanor takes a law-and-order position, asserting that if subversive designs are known beforehand, “Proper measures will undoubtedly be taken by government to prevent its coming to effect,” while Henry takes a more anarchic (dare I say radical) stance that “government … neither desires nor dares to interfere in such matters,” caring nothing for murder. So is Henry being politically provocative, testing for loyalty or solidarity? or is he only flirting, teasing the girls about their ignorance of politics? Well of course he is flirting, but the ambiguity raises questions about his ideological position, and how we can tell; about how much young women should and did know about politics in the age of treason trials and Peterloo; about whose political interests were served by naïveté; about whether the Gothic offered an escape from or a means of confronting, the romantic culture of fear. And overarching all these questions, we must ask how radical Austen is, especially since the double-edged irony that she perfects and deploys with such precision yet ideological uncertainty is precisely the technique used by radicals themselves, who frequently turned to literature, including both Gothic and mock-Gothic forms, in order to say what could not be said openly, safely playing both sides of the fence to avoid prosecution for sedition.

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Austen’s irony, walking the fine line between sedition and entertainment, is a more likely sign of the secret radicalism of Northanger Abbey than her sexual symbolism. Yet the elusive nature of such radical discourse, and the difficulty of distinguishing it from its anti-Jacobin mirror-image, makes it difficult to pin anyone down, and Austen has been claimed by both sides before. We cannot simply assume that her rural gentility made her conservative, any more than we can assume that Henry’s military family did. As in all times of civil and cold war (and the romantic period came close to both), allegiances are mixed and identities fluid. But here, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, John Thelwall offers a useful index, or at least an intertext, since he is definitely a radical, the most visible, notorious and persevering radical of the romantic period; while he may have moderated his views slightly over his long career, he never changed or disclaimed his principles: constitutional reform, democratic equality, universal suffrage, social justice, the rights of man (and woman). Furthermore, intersections between his writings and activities and the plot, imagery and dates of composition and publication of Northanger Abbey offer a useful context for understanding (though perhaps not in the end resolving) the question of Austen’s secret radicalism.

In 1797, shortly before Austen began Northanger Abbey, Thelwall took a Pedestrian Excursion from London that ended at Bath, where he took in the scenic prospect at the very location that prompts Henry’s lesson in the political picturesque. The motive and aim of his excursion was to combine “a passion for picturesque and romantic landscape with a heart throbbing with anxiety for the human race and the history and actual condition of the laborious classes.” Just before Bath he visited Old Sarum, a famous “rotten borough” that invited commentary on inclosure, waste lands, crown lands, and government, such as Henry (possibly) offers (and Thelwall certainly does). Shortly after this, Thelwall indulges some characteristic mockery of the Gothic with scathing comments on a convent in Amesbury (a mansion rather than an abbey, but equally marked by “barbarous Gothic” carvings and cornices,) where “young, inexperienced” women are “kidnapped into bondage,” chaining their consciences with oaths that “prohibit the progress of enquiry” and “annihilate the free agency of reason.”

By late 1817, when Austen’s novel was published, some of these radical Wollstonecraftian ideas about rational education and freedom of speech in women, had become a staple of the public lectures on elocution, history, poetry and drama that Thelwall had been offering for 15 years, replacing his earlier, more explicitly radical political lectures. Two of his regular subjects were the history of female education and the superiority of the female voice; he inveighed against superficialities of “accomplishment,” drew attention to historical heroines like Lucretia and Hersilia, and included recitations from women writers like Barbauld. In his Institution for Elocution and Oratory in London he trained and promoted actresses, treated cases of speech impediment and offered a full education for women as well as men. He offered his lectures throughout Britain, including Southampton, Winchester, and especially frequently, Bath; by the mid teens he was a charismatic celebrity and they were a staple form of entertainment, very popular among women, especially in the middle class to which Austen belonged.

I do not mean to suggest that Austen ever attended these lectures or read his Pedestrian Excursion, or is referencing Thelwall explicitly in any way. What I do want to show is that she could have; she was certainly as well-informed and politically aware as any other man or woman of the era; and there is nothing in what she does or says that might not also have been done or said by the notorious Mr. Thelwall, and vice versa.

In the end, I think, the best guide to deciding or decoding Austen’s “secret radicalism” is her use of irony. And perhaps it is here that the measuring her against Thelwall is most useful. For one of Thelwall’s most significant contributions to literature is the development of a style he calls “seditious allegory”: a form of discourse that exploits ambiguity, irony and the instability of language, originally to avoid prosecution for sedition by making it impossible for readers to pin down his meaning, but more broadly, to add complexity and improve the English language, which was the explicit object of his elocutionary lectures. The multiple ironies, puns and parodies in his fables and comic ballads, as in his lectures and his Jacobin novel, are directed at social critique, but they also offer a training in interpretation that encouraged readers to enquire, to become aware of complexities moral and discursive, and to judge for themselves as informed citizens. Now anti-Jacobin novels also use irony, and as I have already noted, they are sometimes hard to distinguish from Jacobin novels. However, the aim of the irony is different. Irony in the anti-Jacobin novel is usually directed at the excess idealism of Jacobin characters, showing how it is misplaced at best, and at worst hypocritical. With a few notable exceptions, its narrative tends to be quite preachy and obvious; its aim is definitely ideological; it has little interest in education except to encourage stability and the status quo. But in the best Jacobin novels (and I would include Thelwall’s single novel among these) the aim of the irony is not ideology but enquiry; they destabilize and subvert not simply in order to mock their opponents, but in order to raise consciousness, and foster enquiry.

If, as Margaret Atwood has recently said, “the aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity,” then the radical Jacobin novelist, like Thelwall, does the opposite. He fosters ambiguity in order to educate the reader. By that definition, I am proud to claim Jane Austen as a true radical, no longer wrapped in secrecy.

Quotations are from the Penguin edition of Northanger Abbey (1995).

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Tenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Margaret C. Sullivan, Sara Malton, and Dan Macey.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Theresa M. Kenney says she’s “an Austenite by accident”: “I fell in love with Austen after being pressured to read her when I was an undergraduate English and Classics Major at Penn State by my graduate student friends, and when I moved to Texas to teach at the University of Dallas, I was hired as a Medievalist and Early Modernist. However, I was assigned the senior novel seminar when an older colleague was diagnosed with cancer, and taught that class for five years, advising almost 200 senior theses, and teaching Emma repeatedly every spring near the beginning of the syllabus. Then a graduate student begged for a class in Jane Austen, a writer not in favor amongst the builders of our curriculum. I offered the first Austen seminar ever at the university, a class that continues to be enormously popular over ten years later. From that seminar sprang not only that initial student, Joyce Tarpley’s, dissertation on Mansfield Park, now a book, but many student JASNA essay awards, and at least a dozen student publications, among which most recently is Kathryn Davis’s wonderful book, Liberty in Jane Austen’s Persuasion.”

For my “Emma in the Snow” blog series, Theresa wrote about “Emma’s Regency Christmas,” and I’m glad she’s back to write about parental tyranny and filial disobedience for the current series, “Youth and Experience.” Her books include Women Are Not Human: An Anonymous Treatise and Responses. She’s on sabbatical this year, which she says “will allow me both to look after my two little girls (including superintending the education of my own ten-year-old version of Catherine Morland) and to complete two books, one on the Holy Grail, and another on Jane Austen’s sense of an ending.”

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On the strength of this, the general, soon after Eleanor’s marriage, permitted his son to return to Northanger, and thence made him the bearer of his consent, very courteously worded in a page full of empty professions to Mr. Morland. The event which it authorized soon followed: Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang, and everybody smiled; and, as this took place within a twelvemonth from the first day of their meeting, it will not appear, after all the dreadful delays occasioned by the general’s cruelty, that they were essentially hurt by it. To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen is to do pretty well; and professing myself moreover convinced that the general’s unjust interference, so far from being really injurious to their felicity, was perhaps rather conducive to it, by improving their knowledge of each other, and adding strength to their attachment, I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience. (Northanger Abbey, Volume 2, Chapter 16)

Does the author recommend parental tyranny or reward filial disobedience in Northanger Abbey? The novel rather hastily ends with Jane Austen’s usual method of panning out from the participants in the action to a wider, more general view of the drama that has just played out and a subtle sally, telling the moral of the story with tongue in cheek. The final chapter begins with the Morlands’ balking only at the General’s forbidding of the marriage before granting their own consent. Austen reminds us that they are the mildest and most unsuspicious of parents; moreover, they know the general has done their daughter a wrong that some might consider unforgivable. Nonetheless, they sustain the view that a parent’s consent is necessary.

To what extent is Henry, already in his majority and already in charge of a parish, compelled to obey his father or obtain his blessing for his marriage? Austen says clearly: “There was but one obstacle, in short, to be mentioned; but till that one was removed, it must be impossible for them to sanction the engagement. Their tempers were mild, but their principles were steady, and while his parent so expressly forbade the connection, they could not allow themselves to encourage it. That the general should come forward to solicit the alliance, or that he should even very heartily approve it, they were not refined enough to make any parading stipulation; but the decent appearance of consent must be yielded, and that once obtained—and their own hearts made them trust that it could not be very long denied—their willing approbation was instantly to follow. His consent was all that they wished for.”

Principle requires that the parents of the bride refrain from granting their consent to the marriage if even one parent of the groom disapproves. What is that principle?

In this final chapter Austen is balancing her own need for drama—a final obstacle to be overcome before the happy union of Catherine and Henry—with an investigation into a problem that concerned her throughout her career, even up to Persuasion. At what age does a child cease to have an obligation to obey parents? When does filial obligation cease to be the “primary directive”?

In all the novels she wrote, Austen makes applying to the parent for permission to marry the child an important step. One would think with Mrs. Bennet’s eagerness to marry off her daughters in Pride and Prejudice, for instance, consent would be a foregone conclusion, but Austen typically turns to such moments for drama specifically because the conclusion is not foregone, and even in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Bennet might withhold his consent from the union of Darcy and Elizabeth—as he does conclusively in the case of Mr. Collins’s proposal. In Northanger Abbey, Mr. and Mrs. Morland at first withhold their consent, not because they dislike Henry, not because they are angry at the general, but because the general has a right to forbid his son to marry the lady he has chosen, the lady who has accepted his proposal.

Even Henry and Catherine do not resent the necessary separation the general’s angry stubbornness enforces upon them: “The young people could not be surprised at a decision like this. They felt and they deplored—but they could not resent it; and they parted…. Henry returned to what was now his only home, to watch over his young plantations, and extend his improvements for her sake, to whose share in them he looked anxiously forward; and Catherine remained at Fullerton to cry.”

Henry does not go home to Northanger; this is not because Henry chooses not to return, but because his father forbids it. Henry has already earned his hero credits with the reader by his angry defiance of the general, but he does not increase them by direct disobedience after the Morlands lay down the law. In fact, in a touching moment of the narrative, Austen depicts him remodeling his house to Catherine’s taste, looking forward “anxiously” to her living there while all the while thinking the general’s will is unalterable. Catherine’s tears attest to her desire to be with him. They want to be with each other but they remain apart: why? Because Catherine, a minor, is legally obligated to obey her parents, and they in principle will not defy the general’s ban on the marriage.

It is interesting that the Morlands do allow Catherine to receive letters from Henry, as we are informed subtly: “Whether the torments of absence were softened by a clandestine correspondence, let us not inquire. Mr. and Mrs. Morland never did—they had been too kind to exact any promise; and whenever Catherine received a letter, as, at that time, happened pretty often, they always looked another way.” Henry and Catherine’s engagement may be informal as long as his father withholds consent, but it is enough for the Morlands that the two are sincerely committed. However, other, more proper, parents might not have allowed it. Austen often uses as a plot device the understood impropriety of letter writing between unmarried persons: in Emma, between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill; in Mansfield Park, between Henry Crawford, using his sister as his proxy, and Fanny Price (and also between Edmund and Fanny, but that is more of a gray area). In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne writes to Willoughby, although they are not engaged, but her doing so seems proof that they are to her family and others. And even in Pride and Prejudice Mr. Darcy writes to Elizabeth Bennet after her refusal; Darcy justifies his writing of the letter and attempts to keep any word of affection out of it, but it is still a breach of etiquette, although in this case it is not direct disobedience to a parent.

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Other parents, more scrupulous about these standards than the Morlands, might even have confiscated the letters. We modern readers smile upon the Morlands because of their mildness but the narrator also shows them to be rigorous about not acting like the parents of a golddigger might do; we are to understand they are morally good people in part because they await the general’s decision.

I asked my students a question: when is one no longer obligated to obey one’s parents? Answers varied: when you aren’t living under their roof, when you can vote, when you’re eighteen, when you’re sixteen, when you go to college—but of course the answer is never, if you are to obey the fifth commandment: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” In Ephesians, St. Paul even says this is the first commandment to have a promise attached to it, emphasizing its importance. Whit Stillman’s Lady Susan in the 2016 film Love and Friendship manipulates her daughter by invoking this central teaching on family relationships in the Judeo-Christian tradition (and reveals her own Romish leanings by nominating this the fourth commandment, as it is in the Catholic Bible). The Morlands understand Henry is bound by this obedience even though he is a grown man and has independent means. As a Christian minister, he would be even more aware than the normal English layperson of its import, although he initially seems more disinclined than the Morlands to think of it at this juncture.

Fordyce in his famous sermons (which Austen knew well), provides an example of some of the most well-known advice of the era on this matter:

Of filial duty in all its branches she will naturally acquit herself best, who has the deepest sense of religion. “Keep thy father’s commandments, and forsake not the law of thy mother. Bind them continually upon thy heart, and tie them about thy neck. When thou goest, it shall lead thee; when thou sleepest, it shall keep thee; and when thou wakest it shall talk with thee. Whoso revileth his father or his mother, his lamp shall be put out in obscure darkness. The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.” Jesus was subject unto his parents. “Children obey your parents in the Lord; for this is right. Honour thy father and mother (which is the first commandment with promise) that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.” All this a Christian daughter has read with attention, and reflects upon with awe. It corresponds, in substance, with the instinct of nature, which it contributes at once to corroborate and exalt. She who truly reverences her parent in heaven, would tremble at the thought of dishonouring his representatives on earth. From their authority she has acquired the idea of his; and this last, including all that can be conceived of great and good, is the commanding idea of her life.

Austen never shows Catherine reading sermons, even in her youthful exposure to Elegant Extracts and other works. However, the two young people’s lack of resentment of the general’s tyrannical interference, which the narrator insists on, needs some explaining. Fordyce’s standards are not in any way out of the ordinary, but perfectly normal for the period. Austen is thinking of exactly this kind of expected obedience in the final pages of her novel; the hero and heroine’s last test is one of patience and obedience, and they pass it. Instead of eloping, Henry and Catherine wait. And Austen rewards them with the deus ex machina of Eleanor’s fortuitous marriage, which mollifies the general so, he gives Henry leave “to be a fool if he liked.” In fact, the disobedience of Henry consists only in the proposal, and the disobedience of Catherine, only in receiving and writing letters which she must know Henry’s father would disapprove. Austen clearly approves of both actions, in spite of their irregularity, so she seems to take a position resembling an Aristotelian mean. The “Great Forbidder,” General Tilney, is reduced comically to a convenient plot device for the author, and the disobedient children mildly await his paternal nod before their union, their love made stronger by his opposition and their forced separation. Rather than destroying the young people’s chance for happiness, General Tilney creates it and provides the opportunity for the comic ending of the novel.

Quotations are from the Cambridge edition of Northanger Abbey (2013), and from James Fordyce’s “On Good Works,” in Sermons to Young Women, Corrected and Greatly Enlarged (8th edition, 1796).

“It was the air and attitude of a Montoni!” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)

Ninth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Margaret C. Sullivan, Judith Thompson, and Sara Malton.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Gisèle M. Baxter’s teaching and research interests include the Gothic inheritance, especially in Victorian/neo-Victorian literature and popular culture, dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives, and the contemporary bildungsroman. I’m delighted to introduce her guest post on gothic daydreams for my “Youth and Experience” blog series celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

Originally from Nova Scotia, Gisèle moved to Vancouver in 1997 to teach at the University of British Columbia. She’s co-editor, with Brett Grubisic and Tara Lee, of Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature (2014), and she’s currently preparing a Broadview Anthology of British Literature edition of Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla. In her spare time, she takes photographs, writes fiction, and takes beginner-level adult ballet classes.[image error]

…while I have Udolpho to read, I feel as if nobody could make me miserable. Oh! the dreadful black veil! My dear Isabella, I am sure there must be Laurentina’s skeleton behind it. (Northanger Abbey, Volume 1, Chapter 6)

Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the South of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. (Northanger Abbey, Volume 2, Chapter 10)

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Despite its status as a satire of the genre, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is popular among those of us who work in Gothic studies, and came up early in a senior undergraduate course in Victorian supernatural fiction I taught this past year. We were discussing susceptibility in terms of the Gothic reading the governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw has done prior to her arrival at Bly, and of course Jane Eyre’s susceptibility came up, as did Catherine Morland’s.

You probably have, hidden at the back of the metaphorical cupboard of memory, some cultural pleasure of your adolescence you no longer admit to having loved. This is likely truer if you’re still quite young yourself; at some point later you may find yourself revisiting and enjoying it, realizing that your abandonment of it didn’t mean it was rubbish, it meant people whose opinions you valued disparaged it. Possibly nostalgia (even ironic) has caught up with it, and you can then freely broadcast your rediscovered youthful love, confident now that it is cool. In my case, it was Star Trek, the original TV series, which was running in syndication on Saturday mornings when I was in high school in the early 1970s. Star Trek was not cool then, and eventually I shredded my fan stories. Now, of course, I deeply regret that.

If you’ve read Anne of Green Gables, you’ll remember the episode when Marilla sends Anne on an evening errand to Diana’s house, only to discover that the girls, both very fond of ghost stories, have populated the path with characters from such tales and think of it now as the Haunted Wood, and Anne’s intensely sensitive imagination renders the place actually haunted. Marilla takes the tough love approach and insists Anne go anyway; Anne returns insisting, teeth chattering, that she’ll be content with the commonplace from this point. Well, we know she won’t, but after Miss Stacy’s arrival at the school, Anne desperately wants to finish reading a novel called The Lurid Mystery of the Haunted Hall, on loan from Ruby Gillis. However, Miss Stacy says this is not a good book for girls their age (around 13) and so Anne abandons it (with a pang).

I must confess that when reading Anne for the first time, and younger than 13, I felt a little pang at this point, as I too wanted to know what the lurid mystery was. This brings me to 17-year-old Catherine Morland, protagonist (and heroine, after a fashion) of Jane Austen’s posthumously published early novel satirizing Gothic tropes, Northanger Abbey. Despite her lack of conventionally heroic qualities, Catherine loves to read from an early age, and has the opportunity to read quite broadly in her unprosperous but reasonably modern-minded middle-class environment. Her imagination is awakened by the quite lurid variety of 18th century Gothic fiction, all medievalism and sinister castles and predatory villains and virtuous heroines and secrets, and a fair amount of the explained supernatural Ann Radcliffe made a cornerstone of her improving approach to Gothic literature, and it is a nod to the novel’s attitude towards such material that much of it is recommended to Catherine by the duplicitous Isabella Thorne. Or is Northanger Abbey a slyer sort of satire than it is often given credit for being?

True, Catherine makes a fool of herself in trying to impose a Bluebeard narrative on the Abbey’s inhabitants, particularly General Tilney and his late wife. Yet in subtle ways, the novel also makes a case for the virtues of reading, even reading books in formative years that you might put to the back of the cupboard once you are a fully fledged adult.

First, and this is significant, Catherine’s reading becomes one of the first things she discovers in common with her eventual partner, Henry Tilney (though it’s perhaps even more significant that he’s a little older and more widely read).

Second, even if the novel mocks Catherine’s preferred adolescent reading and its effect on her, it also subtly suggests its benefits: she becomes more observant, less apt to give people the benefit of the doubt, so that as the initial pleasantness of association with the Thorpe siblings, James and Isabella, wears off, she discerns both his shallow dullness and her duplicity. And for that matter, even if he’s not hiding deep dark Gothic secrets, General Tilney is an arrogant autocrat with misplaced priorities as far as his children’s happiness is concerned, so that her aversion to him becomes at least partly justified, though not in the way she expected.

Finally, Catherine’s reading preferences reflect a rising trend that was to become even more notable in the 19th century: the production and consumption of what we’d now call “genre fiction” (much of it Gothic, and much of it ghost stories) by the rapidly increasing population of literate women with time to read and write. Indeed, there is an echo of Catherine’s breathless love of this material—if not of Catherine herself—in Little Women’s Jo March, herself an echo of Louisa May Alcott, who got her start writing Gothic fiction for popular magazines. And so, perhaps it’s best just to put those outgrown texts at the back of the cupboard, and not shred your fan stories, for you never know what enjoyment they might yield when revisited later, with an adult’s perspective.

Quotations are from the Penguin Classics edition of Northanger Abbey, edited and with an introduction by Marilyn Butler, revised 2003.

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Eighth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Theresa Kenney, Judith Thompson, and Sara Malton.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Leslie Nyman is the author of an historical novel, The Sound of Her Own Voice, which tells the story of a young woman traveling to the California gold rush. She blogs at soundofherownvoice.wordpress.com, and she lives in Western Massachusetts where, she tells me, she “re-reads Jane Austen regularly, writes fiction, and enjoys retirement.” Leslie is currently working on a fictional biography of Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s travels to the Ottoman Empire in 1716. It’s a pleasure to introduce her guest post on Henry Tilney’s defense of novels in Northanger Abbey.

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Yes, novels, for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very performance to the number of which they are themselves adding; joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?

I cannot approve of it.  Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in the threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another—we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers and while the abilities of the nine hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens,—there 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. (Volume 1, Chapter 5)

I have often wondered about, and completely enjoyed, Jane Austen’s impassioned defense of novels. Sarah’s invitation to participate in her delightful blog has given me the excuse to look more deeply into why Jane Austen wrote this paragraph and what cultural conversation she was joining. I have not been disappointed.

Gillian Dow notes in her essay “Reading at Godmersham: Edward’s Library and Marianne’s Books” (Persuasions 37 [2016]) that “The 18th century was an explosion of literacy in all classes, and ideas of appropriate reading material and the serious nature of reading, were discussed and debated in the private and crucially the public sphere.”

“By the last years of the 18th century the female novel reader had become the epitome of the misguided reading public. She was depicted as filled with delusive ideas, swayed by false ideas of love and romance, unable to concentrate on serious matters—all of which would lead to frivolity, impulsiveness, and possibly sexual indiscretion,” John Brewer says in The Pleasures of the Imagination [1997].

Conduct books came into their own at this time trying to provide a counter weight. Brewer quotes from a 1772 book called New and Elegant Amusements for the Ladies of Great Britain, by a Lady, in which young women were urged to “avoid the swarms of insipid novels, destitute of sentiment, language and morals.”

All this self-righteousness, and sexism, was ripe for Austen’s satire. But she was also a woman of her times and thus added a moral corrective. Catherine Morland, whom I never loved so much as in this latest reading of Northanger Abbey, is the answer to all the busybodies’ concerns. Here is a “heroine” who is often perceptive without understanding what she sees, and who knows right from wrong. One conversation with Henry Tilney easily brings her back to reality from a lurid fantasy. Despite her imagination in a dark room in an Abbey, or her vulnerable position in a coach alone during a long, disappointing ride home she does not resort to hysteria. Jane Austen has given us a practical, common-sense girl. Her moral center and reasonableness remain constant. Her flirtation with Gothic novels is ephemeral and does not threaten her despite Maria Edgeworth’s warning that “Books of mere entertainment … should be sparingly used, especially in the education of girls,” as quoted by Laura Cappello Bromling in “The Novel Reader’s Blues” (Jane Austen Sings the Blues [2009]). Catherine Morland puts the lie to Hannah More’s admonishments that novels “take off wholesome restraints, diminish sober mindedness, impair the general powers of resistance, and at best feed habits of improper indulgence…” (quoted by Bromling).

Jane Austen’s defense continues: “’I am no novel reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.’ Such is the common cant.”

Sadly, three hundred years of attitude and judgements are not easily shaken off. I hate to, but must, admit that when I was a younger woman I often found myself apologizing for reading novels. I wanted to be taken seriously. As Elaine Bander writes in her article “‘O Leave Novels’: Jane Austen, Sir Charles Grandison, Sir Edward Denham and Rob Mossgiel” (Persuasions 30 [2008]), “both Burney and Edgeworth, the two authors whose novels [Austen] praises here, had labeled their own novels ‘works,’ rather than expose them to critical disdain by classifying them as ‘novels’” (my emphasis). Happily, with age and maturity I have been cured. I openly join my favorite author in claiming that in novels “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.”

Quotations from Northanger Abbey are taken from the 1880 edition published in London by Richard Bentley.

“The luxury of a … frightened imagination over the pages of Udolpho.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)

Seventh in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Gisèle Baxter, Theresa Kenney, and Judith Thompson.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).