Robert Rodi's Blog, page 5

Northanger Abbey, chapters 29-31

We’re riding hard towards the conclusion now…and Catherine’s riding hard towards home, having been kicked to the curb by General Tilney and sent back to Fullerton with her tail between her legs. And she still has no idea why. To make matters worse, the road she’s traveling is the same one she took on the recent outing to Woodston, Henry Tilney’s adorable little clerical seat, where she had such a super-delicious afternoon; and as a result every sight she sees—the highwayman strung up from a branch, the unusually gruesome roadkill—just bring bittersweet memories of what she’s lost.
Reflecting on the outing to Woodston, Catherine thinks, “It was there, it was on that day, that the general had made use of such expressions with regard to Henry and herself…as to give her the most positive conviction of his actually wishing their marriage.” So now it suits Austen to have Catherine be aware of all the general’s nudge-nudge-wink-winks; problem is, at the time, she was pretty specific in saying Catherine was oblivious to them. She resolves this discrepancy by having Catherine observe that the general “had even confused her by his too significant reference!” It’s one of the rare clumsy moments in Austen’s work, and it brings us out of the narrative for a moment, which is unfortunate; but I’m willing to bet that, had Austen lived to see the novel published, she’d have given it one more edit before the type was set, and buffed this little blemish right out.
Wondering why the general turned on her so suddenly, Catherine can only come up with one possible explanation: he’s learned of her earlier suspicions that he murdered his wife. Which, yeah, would be likely to sour him on her just a tad. The only problem being, there’s no way the general couldhave found this out. “Henry and her heart only were privy to the shocking suspicions which she had so idly entertained; and equally safe did she believe her secret with each. Designedly, at least, Henry could not have betrayed her.” Okay, but what about undesignedly?...Well, Henry hardly seems the type to get roaring drunk and start blabbing secrets. Maybe he talks in his sleep? Though even if he did, his father would scarcely be there to hear him. Maybe he sleeptalks andsleepwalks? Anyway, you see the difficulty.
Thinking of Henry only turns Catherine’s mind to a “a more prevailing, more impetuous concern.”
How Henry would think, and feel, and look, when he returned on the morrow to Northanger and heard of her being gone, was a question of force and interest to rise over every other, to be never ceasing, alternately irritating and soothing…To the general, of course, he would not dare to speak; but to Eleanor—what might he not say to Eleanor about her?
We readers are still not entirely convinced that Henry’s feelings for Catherine are anything more than superficial; still, she’s been a worshipful little presence at his elbow, and he won’t like his father just jettisoning her without ceremony. I imagine he’ll feel like the kid who discovers his parents have put down the family dog while he was at school.
Anyway, Catherine’s mind is so beset by her various demons that she barely even notices the villages and towns flying by her, and as a result the time passes much more swiftly than she’d imagined it would. This isn’t necessarily a good thing; she’s not in any real hurry to get home—“for to return in such a manner to Fullerton was almost to destroy the pleasure of a meeting with those she loved best,” even after so many weeks away from them. Still, there’s nothing she can do about it, and by seven o’clock finds herself back on her home turf. Seven o’clock being, in rural England, long after the streets have been rolled up and decent folk shut up indoors.
Austen uses the occasion for one last flourish of the ironic narrative device that she’s employed so brilliantly throughout the novel.
A heroine returning, at the close of her career, to her native village, in all the triumph of recovered reputation, and all the dignity of a countess, with a long train of noble relations in their several phaetons, and three waiting-maids in a traveling chaise and four, behind her, is an event on which the pen of the contriver may well delight to dwell; it gives credit to every conclusion, and the author must share in the glory she so liberally bestows. But my affair is widely different; I bring back my heroine to her home in solitude and disgrace; and no sweet elation of spirits can lead me into minuteness. A heroine in a hack post-chaise is such a blow upon sentiment, as no attempt at grandeur or pathos can withstand.
Now that’s the way to wrap it up.
We’re told that the chaise of a traveler is “a rare sight in Fullerton,” so Catherine’s whole family jams into the window to see who it is; and everyone is astonished to see Catherine step down—everyone except the two youngest children, “who expected a brother or sister in every carriage.” Beautiful detail.
Catherine is swept into a volley of hugs, and in “the joyfulness of family love everything for a short time was subdued,” so that it’s a while before her parents can get her indoors, and begin to draw out the story of what the bloody buggery bollocks Catherine’s doing showing up like this, so late and unannounced and evertyhing.
They were far from being an irritable race; far from any quickness in catching, or bitterness in resenting, affronts; but here, when the whole was unfolded, was an insult not to be overlooked, nor, for the first half hour, to be easily pardoned…General Tilney had acted neither honourably nor feelingly—neither as a gentleman nor as a parent.
Since no one can figure out the general’s motive, they eventually just write him off, concluding that “it was a strange business, and that he must be a very strange man.” And Catherine’s parents—implacably practical, down-to-earth sorts, are prepared to leave it there.
“Well,” continued her philosophic mother, “I am glad I did not know of your journey at the time; but now it is all over, perhaps there is no great harm done. It is always good for young people to be put upon exerting themselves; and you know, my dear Catherine, you always were a sad little shatter-brained creature; but now you must have been forced to have your wits about you, with so much changing of chaises and forth; and I hope it will appear that you have not left anything behind you in any of the pockets.”
Austen’s gifts are so overflowing at this stage of her career, that she actually gives us an essentially new comic creation here in the second-to-last chapter of the whole goddamn novel. I say “essentially new” because there were a few choice moments with Mrs. Morland at the very beginning; but here Austen brings her center stage, with her sleeves rolled up and her feet square beneath her, ready to get on with whatever needs getting on with and no shilly-shallying, please.
Alas, Catherine’s withered-flower routine continues into the next morning, leaving her parents a little disconcerted but still hopeful she’ll snap back to normal soon enough. Catherine begins the day, promisingly enough, with the difficult task of writing to Eleanor.
To compose a letter which might at once do justice to her sentiments and her situation, convey gratitude without servile regret, be guarded without coldness, and honest without resentment—a letter which Eleanor might not be pained by the perusal of—and, above all, which she might not blush herself, if Henry should chance to see, was an undertaking to frighten away all her powers of performance; and, after long thought and much perplexity, to be very brief was all that she could determine on with any confidence of safety.
So she settles for dashing off that she’s home safe, thx 4 everything, btw here’s the $ you lent me, cheers CU later x o Cath. Which, now that we’ve gotten to know her parents, we realize is exactly the kind of straight-to-the-point communication they’d approve of.
Mr. and Mrs. Morland really are just a wonderfully there-it-is-then kinda couple. Reflecting on the way Isabella Thorpe pulled a fast one on both her son and daughter, Mrs. M. can only say, “Well, we must live and learn; and the next few friends you make I hope will be better worth keeping.”
Seriously. If she ever ran for high office, I’d vote for her.
Catherine, however, remains a drippy mess, slouching about the house and thinking Henry, Henry, Henry, and not only not pulling herself up by her bootstraps, but letting her bootstraps trail behind her like wet noodles. Mrs. Morland decides that maybe a visit to the Allens will jar her daughter back into spirits, and even though we know it won’t, we’re all yes, please! because—Mrs. Allen.
That lady doesn’t disappoint, either. After Mrs. M. relates the scandalous way Catherine was booted from Northanger and sent seventy miles home unescorted, Mr. Allen lets loose with some strongly worded indignation, “and Mrs. Allen thought his expressions quite good enough to be immediately made use of again by herself.” In fact she parrots just about everything he says, until he pulls a fast one by excusing himself, leaving his wife to make her own way in the conversation.
And, “I really have not patience with the general,” was uttered twice after Mr. Allen left the room, without any relaxation of anger, or any material digression of thought. A more considerable degree of wandering attended the third repetition; and, after completing the fourth, she immediately added, “Only think, my dear, of my having got that frightful rent in my best Mechlin so charmingly mended, before I left Bath, that one can hardly see where it was. I must show it to you some day or other.”
Have we missed her?...Oh hell yeah we’ve missed her!
As they return home, Mrs. M. is all, see how many people think you’re totes adorbs? The idea being, who cares what the Tilneys think when the Allens are so very Catherine-rules? But the gambit’s a bust. “There was a great deal of good sense in all this; but there are some situations of the human mind in which good sense has very little power; and Catherine’s feelings contradicted almost every position her mother advanced.” She’s just too deep in her own private melancholy, “silently reflecting that now Henry must have arrived at Northanger; nowhe must have heard of her departure; and now, perhaps, they were all setting off for Hereford.”
Annnnd…that’s it. That’s our farewell to Catherine’s private thoughts. Because in the next chapter, Austen switches over to Mrs. Morland’s point of view. This is a neat trick to pull at the end of a novel—I’ve done it myself (in fact, I may have got the idea here). You get your hero or heroine to a certain point of crisis, and rather than risk the resolution of that crisis being anticlimactic, you switch narrative perspective so that you see it from the outside—creating a layer of distance between the reader and the action, and setting up some good old fashioned tension, right when tension would otherwise be on the wane. Yeah, J.A. knows her stuff, all right. She knows it clean down to the ground.
Anyway, we find Mrs. M. very worried and confused by the way Catherine’s still drooping and sighing all over the place, like a houseplant that insists on wilting even though it’s getting plenty of water.
She could neither sit still nor employ herself for ten minutes together…Her loss of spirits was a yet greater alteration. In her rambling and her idleness she might only be a caricature of herself; but in her silence and sadness she was the very reverse of all that had she had been before.
Mrs. M. tries to exhort Catherine to get over herself and be useful—in vain. In my opinion, she ought to try the exhortation of a few cracks of hairbrush to Catherine’s gluteus maximus, but Mrs. M. has apparently too steady a temper for domestic violence. Instead, she focuses on ferreting out the reason for this dying-swan routine.
“I hope, my Catherine, you are not getting out of humour with home because it is not so grand as Northanger. That would be turning your visit into an evil, indeed. Wherever you are you should always be contented, but especially at home, because there you must spend the most of your time. I did not quite like, at breakfast, to hear you talk so much about the French bread at Northanger.”
Mrs. M. now recalls having read in book entitled The Mirror, “a very clever essay…about young girls who have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance”, and she decides it’s just the thing for Catherine to read, to re-frame her mind. Catherine is unimpressed by this, and continues languishing on the couch, pulling out her hair one little tuft at a time.
Mrs. M. now has a mission, and she’s a gal who likes having a mission. Actually, I’m betting she likes having three or four, so she can tack between them during the day and never get bored. (She’s basically the Elizabeth Warren of Austen-land.) She sprints upstairs to locate that copy of The Mirror, and between one thing and another—since she’s the sort who, while searching for one thing, will notice ten others that need immediate attention—it’s fifteen minutes before she comes down again, and when she does “the first object she beheld was a young man whom she had never seen before.”
There has never in English literature been a woman less likely to be quailed by running full-tilt into a stranger in her sitting room (she could find a Bengal tiger there and not break a sweat), so Mrs. M. is all aplomb when her “conscious” daughter introduces this young man as Mr. Henry Tilney.
Henry, less self-possessed than his hostess, apologizes for his sudden appearance at her house, “acknowledging that after what had passed he had little right to expect a welcome” there. He’s come, he says, only to reassure himself that Miss Morland has made it home safely.
This seems a tad lame as an excuse, as I presume Austen means it to. But it does bring up a central problem, now that we’ve reached this juncture in the narrative; that being—what is Henry Tilney doing here? We know, of course, that he’s come to declare his love for Catherine and propose, because that’s what heroes always do in the last ten pages of Jane Austen novels; only in this case it seems as though he’s doing it only because it’s required that he do it. He’s the least ardent hero in the entire Austen canon—the most entirely self-contained, the least eager to please anyone but himself, the most artificially social. And Catherine, as a love object, remains pretty unremarkable stuff. So we can’t imagine what it is that’s inspired him to actually get on a horse (or order up a coach) and come all this way in pursuit of her. My own conclusion—the best I can manage—is that he’s aware of what a dashing figure he’ll cut by doing so, and of the fawning that will accompany his arrival.
If so, he’s certainly right about that; Mrs. M., so far from being affronted by his coming, is eating out of his hands within seconds. And Catherine—as she sits listening to him politely answer all his mother’s many questions—is a good deal beyond that. At this point, she’d take a bullet for Henry Tilney.
Catherine…said not a word; but her glowing cheek and brightened eye made her mother trust that this good-natured visit would at least set her heart at ease for a time, and gladly therefore did she lay aside the first volume of The Mirrorfor a future hour.
Love that detail. Mrs. M. has invested a fair amount of time in tracking down that pesky volume, so she’s not letting it go to waste. Catherine might now spring back to her old self, or even better…but she’s still gonna read that goddamn essay.
Henry, in a bid to get Catherine alone, now asks Mrs. M. whether the Allens live nearby, and whether they might be home at present, and then—turning to Catherine—inquires whether she’d show him the way there? Oooh, the sly dog. This little stratagem is almost undone by Catherine’s sister Sarah saying, “You may see the house from this window, sir,” which “produced only a bow of acknowledgment from the gentleman, and a silencing nod from her mother;” and if anyone is capable of a “silencing nod,” it would have to be Mrs. M.
We’re reminded of Mrs. Bennet, trying to clear the way for Mr. Bingley to propose to Jane. But it turns out no such romantic notions are driving Mrs. M. in her efforts to clear the way for Catherine and Mr. Tilney to go off alone. She just thinks that Mr. Tilney might have “some explanation to give of his father’s behaviour, which it must be more pleasant for him to communicate only to Catherine”. And in fact she’s not entirely wrong.
Some explanation on his father’s account he had to give; but his first purpose was to explain himself, and before they reached Mr. Allen’s grounds he had done it so well that Catherine did not think it could be repeated too often. She was assured of his affection; and that heart in return was solicited, which, perhaps, they pretty equally knew was already entirely his own…
Northanger Abbey is the loopiest, most irreverent, least conventional of Austen’s novels; we realize it has to end with the coming together of the hero and heroine, because the conventions of the genre demand it, but we don’t expect too much tra-la-la to be made of it. Even so, it does take your breath away a bit, the way Austen tosses off the whole matter with a few flicks of her wrist. I’ve said many times that she’s the least romantic writer ever to be labeled otherwise, but here, in this passage, you can almost feel the cold wind blowing between the lines.
And if that weren’t enough to convince you, there’s the admission—or rather, the confirmation—that although Henry Tilney “was now sincerely attached” to Catherine and “truly loved her society,” the author herself confesses “that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought.” Translation: he only learned to like her because she liked him so much.
It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own.
The “credit of a wild imagination” is pretty much why I read Jane Austen at all, so I’m more than ready to give it to her. It sure as hell ain’t for lovey-dovey destined-for-each-other wedding-bell crapola, because in that arena she dependably flatlines.
Anyway, after the big confession of “I love how you love me” and the subsequent visit to the Allens (which is lamentably short on details), Henry gets around to telling Catherine how, when he returned to the abbey, he was told by his father that she’d been sent away, “and ordered to think of her no more”, which I think is another clue in the puzzle that is Henry’s pursuit of Catherine. I think he’s been perfectly fine, up to now, acknowledging his father’s authority and conducting himself in accord with it; but when the general actually starts ordering him in the matter of his affections…well, Henry’s pride (which is considerable) can’t be havin’ that.
Especially since his old man can’t even give him any clear justification for trashing Catherine. “The general had nothing to accuse her of, nothing to lay to her charge, but her being the involuntary, unconscious object of a deception which his pride could not pardon”.  And what, you may ask, is this “deception” he speaks of? Well, you won’t be surprised to hear that John Thorpe is the culprit. Remember that night at the theater, when Catherine saw John and the general talking to each other and somehow knew they were talking about her? It turns out that John, “most happy to be on speaking terms with a man of General Tilney’s importance” and “likewise pretty well resolved on marrying Catherine himself,” couldn’t help boasting of his intended bride as being a helluva lot more swank than was ever actually the case.
…[A]nd by merely adding twice as much for the grandeur of the moment, by doubling what he chose to think the amount of Mr. Morland’s preferment, trebling his private fortune, bestowing a rich aunt, and sinking half the children, he was able to represent the whole family to the general in a most respectable light.
For good measure he gave Catherine “ten or fifteen thousand pounds” and made her a future beneficiary of Mr. Allen’s estate. If the play’s interval hadn’t ended, forcing him back to his seat, he might have gone on to throw in a chalet in Bavaria and placed Catherine in line to the throne of Sicily.
“Upon such intelligence the general had proceeded; for never had it occurred to him to doubt its authority.” Which clearly means he’d never met John Thorpe before. And it serves him right, then, that his impulse was to steal away this jewel-encrusted little prize from John and fling her in the path of his own son, who seemed to like her a little already. And it was only much, much later, after having spent weeks being pleasant to Catherine and smiling at her so hard his jaw hurt, that he discovered how badly he’d been taken in.
The revelation came, poetically enough, from John Thorpe—who, still stinging from Catherine’s refusal of him and from the newer irritation of James Morland’s breakup with Isabella, couldn’t say enough bad about the family…about whom, he confessed to the general, he was totally, completely, terrifically mistaken. And where he previously made his case for Catherine’s worth by ridiculously multiplying her assets, now he devalued her by doing the exact opposite.
[The Morlands] were, in fact, a necessitous family; numerous, too, almost beyond example; by no means respected in their own neighbourhood, as he had lately had particular opportunities of discovering; aiming at a style of life which their fortune could not warrant; seeking to better themselves by wealthy connections; a forward, bragging, scheming race.
After all that, you almost can’t blame the general for storming home and ejecting Catherine from the premises. Except…the big idiot has once again made the fatal mistake of taking John Thorpe at his word. Did he learn nothing the first time ’round?
Austen now confesses that she’s told us rather more of the back story than Henry himself chose to reveal to Catherine (or in fact that Henry himself could even know). But “Catherine, at any rate, heard enough to feel that in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.”
So, that’s it, then. That’s what’s brought us to this interesting pass:
Mr. and Mrs. Morland’s surprise on being applied to by Mr. Tilney for their consent to his marrying their daughter was, for a few minutes, considerable, it having never entered their heads to suspect an attachment on either side…
Seriously? It never even occurred to them? How is that even possible?...There are two explanations here, as I see it, the first being that the Ma and Pa Morland are such salt-of-the-earth sorts that the idea of courtin’ and sparkin’ is as alien to them as debatin’ in the House of Lords. The alternate is that, why would anyonethink of romance in conjunction with Henry Tilney, when he’s more entranced by his own reflection than by any nubile young thing in his immediate vicinity? Even if he’s chased her halfway across England’s green and pleasant land?
In the end, it’s irrelevant; Ma and Pa get over their surprise (of course they do) and immediately give their consent. Why the hell wouldn’t they? Mr. Tilney’s “pleasing manners and good sense were self-evident recommendations; and having never heard evil of him, it was not their way to suppose any evil could be told.” Mrs. M.’s only reservation is that Catherine’s bound to be a washout as a housekeeper, “but quick was the consolation of there being nothing like practice.”
I don’t know why Austen kept the Morlands offstage till the very last chapters, but I gotta say, I hold it very much against her.
The Morlands have just one condition on their approval, however: being upright sorts who do things by the book, their consent is dependent on the youngsters also getting the green light from Henry’s old man.
His consentwas all that they wished for. They were no more inclined than entitled to demand his money. Of a very considerable fortune, his son was, by marriage settlements, eventually secure; his present income was an income of independence and comfort, and under every pecuniary view, it was a match beyond the claims of their daughter.
So even Catherine’s loving parents are on some level like, “Really?...He’s choosing her?”
Henry and Catherine are pretty much stalemated, since it seems impossible that General Tilney will ever have a change of heart, minus something like a traumatic blow to the head, the possibility of which we can forgive the young pair if they take a moment or two to contemplate. So Henry sulks back to Woodston and Catherine settles back in at Fullerton, to wait for a miracle.
This being a novel—and Austen presumably getting eager to end the thing, already—a miracle is exactly what Henry and Catherine get. Eleanor ends up marrying spectacularly well—title, fortune, bling, the whole enchilada—and her father is so ecstatic over this exalted connection (“never had the general loved his daughter so well in all her hours of companionship, utilty, and patient endurance as when he first hailed her ‘Your Ladyship!’ ”) that Eleanor is easily able to obtain his forgiveness of Henry, “and his permission for him ‘to be a fool if he liked it!’ ”
Henry, naturally, likes it. And in the course of subsequent days the general learns the truth about his prospective daughter-in-law’s family—that they aren’t the pack of ravenous hyena-people John Thorpe made them out to be—and he softens even further. He doesn’t exactly do an Ebeneezer Scrooge one-eighty, and come prancing to Fullerton bearing garlands of flowers and a roasted pig, but he does let Henry return to Northanger and gives him his full consent, “very courteously worded in a page full of empty professions to Mr. Morland.”
So the way is clear for the wedding, and as always in Austen, this is the exact moment when anyone expecting a brilliantly glittering set piece, an apotheosis of romantic yearning and submission, of dewy virginity yielding with full fanfare to worthy machismo, while choirs sing and happy tears flow, culminating in a soft-focus kiss at the moment of conjugation—well, they’re pretty much screwed.
Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang, and everyone 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.
Your average corned beef sandwich has more romance in it.
Northanger Abbey is probably the least regarded of Austen’s novels—not in the sense that it’s the least liked (Mansfield Park takes that prize), but in the sense that it’s the least-often read, the least-often discussed, the least-often considered. There’s just too much in it that throws your average dingbat Austen fan into confusion: an unexceptional heroine who never rises to anything beyond a certain baseline competency, a foppish hero whose motives are never entirely understandable, and a one-sided love affair whose only triumph is that the other side is eventually flattered into signing on.
But it’s my own favorite in the canon, after (of course) Pride and Prejudice. Because its first draft was written early in Austen’s career, it retains much of the swagger of the joyfully anarchic fiction she wrote in such quantity during her adolescence. And this is balanced by the psychologically nuanced character portrayals we associate with Austen in her full maturity. To me, it’s the most representative of her works, twining the brash irreverence of her juvenile period with the sagacity and reflection of her mastery.
And the fact that the romance element is a bit stringy and coarse to the palate?...Yeah, that too.

Northanger Abbey, chapters 25-28

When we last left Catherine, she’d just been busted by Henry Tilney for her crazy-lady delusions about Henry’s father (i.e. that he’s a wife-abusing murderer, no wait, a wife-imprisoning liar, no wait…), and he slammed her so hard for it that she had to pick up the various pieces of herself and tuck them under her arms before she could hightail it back to her room.
And there, behind closed doors, she engages in the favorite pastime of seventeen-year-old girls everywhere, i.e. lamenting the End Of Everything
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…She hated herself more than she could express. He had—she thought he had, once or twice before this fatal morning, shown something like affection for her. But now...
If she were really determined to be a Gothic novel heroine, she’d hurl herself out the window to her death. But alas, now that the chips are down, she doesn’t have what the gumption. (Just as well; as her room is only on the second floor, she might only suffer a broken leg or something, and how embarrassing would thatbe?)
But she needn’t have whipped herself into such a state of panic. Henry Tilney is the shallowest of all Austen’s heroes, and the offense he took at Catherine’s insulting suspicions is about as deeply felt as the affection he has for her (which she’s “thought” she’d felt “once or twice”): meaning, it’s essentially a whim. As soon as she was out of his sight, he probably forgot all about it (probably forgot all about her). Certainly when she comes down at five o’clock to join the others, she finds him not only no longer affronted, but paying her “rather more attention than usual. Catherine had never wanted comfort more, and he looked as if he was aware of it.” Of course he’s aware of it; he’s always aware of the means by which he can confuse her into adoring him. Why risk driving her away with anger, when with kindness he can keep her at his elbow watching his every move and thinking Henry Henry Henry…
This narrow escape from infamy seems finally to have taught Catherine her lesson (although we’ve heard that before). In her first real bout of actual self-analysis, she sees that “it had been all a voluntary, self-created delusion…by a mind which, before she entered the abbey, had been craving to be frightened.”
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.
Wait…do we like novels, or don’t we? Is reading them acceptable, or indefensible? We’re suddenly walking a bit of a narrative tightrope here. Possibly Austen is telling us that novels are like alcohol: best to know how much you can handle before you dip in.
But even here, Catherine can’t bring herself to blame Udolpho and its ilk entirely. The way she sees it, it’s only an accident of geography that’s allowed fiction to steer her wrong. If she were in some degraded European locale, novels would be a valuable resource in navigating the noxious, rapacious native traditions—like, you know, rape, pillage, genocide, yodeling. Even of her own country, she would, “if hard pressed…have yielded the northern and western extremities.”
But in the central part of England, there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist.
So there it is: she’s escaped the perils of a lurid imagination for the safer shores of xenophobia.
Having forgiven herself and resolved to be more rational going forward (and who knows, she may pull it off—beginner’s luck, and all), she can go back to more mundane pursuits, like wishing desperately to hear from Isabella.
She was quite impatient to know how the Bath world went on, and how the rooms were attended; and especially was she anxious to be assured of Isabella’s having matched some fine netting-cotton, on which she had left her intent; and of her continuing on the best terms with James.
In that order, presumably.
But no letter comes for “nine successive mornings” (a phrase I love because “successive” is in the purest sense redundant, yet provides such wonderful emphasis); then on the tenth, Henry at long last brings her a missive…though it’s from James, not Isabella. James, who never promised to write her at all, and probably never would have except that he’s got a bombshell, and when you’ve got a bombshell, well, you’ve got to drop it somewhere. “…I think it my duty to tell you,” he begins, “that everything is at an end between Miss Thorpe and me.”
I left her and Bath yesterday, never to see either again. I shall not enter into particulars—they would only pain you more. You will soon hear enough from another quarter to know where lies the blame…
Actually, she’ll here it from this quarter, and only a few lines later. “I wish your visit at Northanger may be over before Captain Tilney makes his engagement known, or you will be uncomfortably circumstanced.” Uh-oh. Funny how Catherine can see captive wives chained behind stone walls, but she couldn’t see thiscoming. James continues:
Her duplicity hurts me more than all; till the very last, if I reasoned with her, she declared herself as much attached to me as ever, and laughed at my fears…I cannot understand even now what she would be at, for there could be no need of my being played off to make her secure of Tilney.
Catherine, reading this in Henry’s presence, reacts with “short exclamations of sorrowing wonder”; in other words, she gasps and grunts and possibly whinnies and yaps. Henry has no time to inquire what the matter is (or to ask her please not to gnaw on the arm of the chair) because the general enters and leads them in to breakfast. There Catherine is so upset that she’s unable to eat. But the general, “between his cocoa and his newspaper, had luckily no leisure for noticing her”—which, considering that she’s weeping openly, is saying something. Either the morning’s headlines are seriously sensational, or that is some ridiculously superfine cocoa.
Henry and Eleanor are aware of her distress, though; and eventually they corral her and gently try to get her to divulge the cause of her big sad. She parcels it out in agonizing little chunks (“My letter was from my brother at Oxford”—“I do not think I shall ever wish for a letter again”—“Poor James is so unhappy! You will soon know why”) and you get the idea she’s actually enjoying keeping the Tilney siblings in suspense. But then she overplays her hand.
“I have one favour to beg,” said Catherine, shortly afterwards, in an agitated manner, “that, if your brother should be coming here, you will give me notice of it, that I may go away.”
“Our brother! Frederick!”
“Yes; I am sure I should be very sorry to leave you so soon, but something has happened that would make it very dreadful for me to remain in the same house with Captain Tilney.”
Like a Wheel of Fortune contestant, Henry Tilney has now had enough clues to guess the phrase, and slam dunks it with ISABELLA HAS DUMPED JAMES FOR FREDERICK. “How quick you are!” Catherine exclaims, again demonstrating the main source of her appeal for Henry: the way she flatters his vanity.
But Henry, quick as he is, is also no fool. “I hope,” he says, “so far as concerns my brother, you are misinformed.” In fact, he’d bet cash money on it.
“His marrying Miss Thorpe is not probable. I think you must be deceived so far. I am very sorry for Mr. Morland—sorry that anyone you love should be unhappy; but my surprise would be greater at Frederick’s marrying her than at any other part of the story.”
Rather than keep protesting in her own voice, Catherine gives him the letter so he judge for himself. “Well,” he says after reading it, “if it is to be so, I can only say that I am sorry for it. Frederick will not be the first man who has chosen a wife with less sense than his family expected. I do not envy his situation, either as a lover or a son.”
Miss Tilney, who’s never met Isabella, now asks for some details, including whether the Thorpes are a wealthy family. Catherine replies:
“No, not very. I do not believe Isabella has any fortune at all: but that will not signify in your family. Your father is so very liberal! He told me the other day that he only valued money as it allowed him to promote the happiness of his children.” The brother and sister looked at each other.
Damn right they look at each other. They’ve known their old man long enough to be well used to his penchant for bullshit. Unfortunately, Catherine is still taking people at face value. Otherwise she’d be able to finally make the connection—probably the only one—between Isabella and General Tilney: they’re both people who tirelessly proclaim themselves to be the exact opposite of what they really are.
The Tilney sibs are confused by their brother’s behavior. Eleanor can’t believe that he’d actually pledge himself to a girl who, “before his eyes, is violating an engagement voluntarily entered into with another man. Is not it inconceivable, Henry?” Henry, who’s never been overly flattering when discussing his brother, doesn’t pull any punches now.
“It is all over with Frederick indeed! He is a deceased man—defunct in understanding. Prepare for your sister-in-law, Eleanor, and such a sister-in-law as you must delight in! Open, candid, artless, guileless, with affections strong but simple, forming no pretensions, and knowing no disguise.”
“Such a sister-in-law, Henry, I should delight in,” said Eleanor with a smile.
Once again, Catherine is the only living creature in the western hemisphere who doesn’t get the meaning of Miss Tilney’s little riposte. No, she’s too busy summoning her inner Pollyanna, wondering whether Isabella might conduct herself more suitably with the Tilneys than she did with the Morlands. “Now she has really got the man she likes, she may be constant.”
“Indeed I am afraid she will,” replied Henry; “I am afraid she will be very constant, unless a baronet should come in her way; that is Frederick’s only chance. I will get the Bath paper, and look over the arrivals.”
“You think it is all for ambition then? And, upon my word, there are some things that seem very like it. I cannot forget that, when she first knew what my father would do for them, she seemed quite disappointed that it was not more. I never was so deceived in anyone’s character in my life before.”
“Among all the great variety that you have known and studied.”
Oooh, that Henry can be such a bitch. (Though I’ve got to admit: while I’ll never really like him, he is totally owning this chapter.)
A little more talk with the Tilneys causes Catherine to realize she’s not as torn up over the revelation of Isabella’s character as she might be; probably because Eleanor’s friendship has shown her what a rum bit of business Isabella’s was from the get go. So she leaves them in better spirits than she ever would’ve imagined.
She feels a little less slap-happy when, on reflection, she considers that one of the main points the Tilneys made—that the general would never allow his son to marry a girl without “consequence and fortune”—could apply as much to her as to Isabella. But then she recalls what a big fan of hers the general’s always been, and remembers as well all of his “most generous and disinterested sentiments on the subject of money,” which lead her to conclude that his children just don’t get the guy. Under his ramrod stiff exterior, he’s obviously a total hippie.
As for Captain Tilney, Henry and Eleanor have reassured Catherine that there’s no need for her to worry about having to skipper away from Northanger Abbey on his account, because it’s unlikely he’ll show his face; he would “not have the courage to apply in person for his father’s consent”—meaning, I guess, that he’ll attempt to do so by carrier pigeon, or Candygram.
Still, Catherine starts to worry—because, I guess, there’s not enough to keep her mind occupied, now that she’s given up trying to ferret out sarcophagi in the dovecotes—that when Captain Tilney doesprevail on his father, he’ll paint the whole ugly scenario in the rosiest light, leaving out the disgusting behavior of both himself and Isabella. Catherine hurries to Henry and urges him to go to the general and tell him the whole truth now, so he’ll better be able to judge when the time comes. Once again, she’s pleading with Henry to take some action on her account; and once again she gets the same flat answer.
“No,” said he, “my father’s hands need not be strengthened. Frederick’s confession of folly need not be forestalled. He must tell his own story.”
“But he will tell only half of it.”
“A quarter would be enough.”
He is a tough guy to argue with. If only he didn’t so obviously know it.
The days pass on and just as the siblings predicted, there’s no sign of, or word from, their brother; and in the meantime the general comes up with a scheme to entertain Catherine, whose agitation he obviously takes for boredom. When Henry is called away to Woodston, the general decides they’ll “take him by surprise there some day or other, and eat their mutton with him.” And for once, the general has scored a touchdown; Henry digs the plan, and Catherine is over the moon.
But in the course of one hilarious page, this larky scheme of just showing up when Henry least expects it, and eating whatever humble fare he happens to have on his table that night (because the general is the last man ever to stand on ceremony or insist on special treatment or blah blah blah), evolves slowly and steadily into a specific, almost military operation with a fixed date and time.
“…[O]n Wednesday, I think, you may expect us; and we shall be with you early, that we may have time to look about us. Two hours and three quarters will carry us to Woodston, I suppose; we shall be in the carriage by ten; so, about a quarter before one on Wednesday, you may look for us.”
Oh, that General Tilney and his zany spontaneity!
The next thing we know, Henry is leaving two days earlier than expected; he appears “booted and greatcoated” before Catherine and his sister—probably to show off how superfine he accessorizes—and delivers a looong farewell; I mean, you’d think he was packing off to Russia for a year, the way he goes on. (I suppose he’s just soaking up one last batch of limelight to sustain him for the days ahead, when he’ll have worshipful no audience to play to.)
Catherine asks why he has to go away so early. “Because,” he replies, “no time is to be lost in frightening my old housekeeper out of her wits, because I must go and prepare a dinner for you to be sure.” Catherine tells him that’s not necessary, the general plainly said they’ll eat anything he has on hand and never mind any ceremony. And Henry and Eleanor just look at her and laugh and laugh and laugh.
This confuses Catherine, who has to go off in a quiet corner and wonder “why [the general] should say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while…How were people, at that rate, to be understood?” So, yeah, another potential title for this novel could be, Born Yesterday.
With Henry gone, it does in fact happen that Catherine grows bored. “She was tired of the woods and the shrubberies—always so smooth and so dry; and the abbey in itself was no more to her now than any other house.” That’s right…she really, honestly, no-freakin’-kidding has gotten over being all ooga-booga about every goddamn thing at Northanger.
What a revolution in her ideas! She, who had so longed to be in an abbey! Now, there was nothing so charming to her imagination as the unpretending comfort of a well-connected parsonage, something like Fullerton, but better. Fullerton had its faults, but Woodston probably had none. If Wednesday should ever come!
This is gratifying in one sense; we need to see Catherine conclude her coming-of-age arc—and the transfer of her private fantasies from demon-haunted Northanger to idyllic Woodston, signals the change from girlish immaturity to wifely readiness (since Woodston will be her principal address, once she’s got Henry to put a ring on it).
In another sense, though, this is a little dispiriting; we’ve still got fifty pages to go in this baby, and we’re not sure how we’re going to get through them without Catherine stumbling around in the dark with a candle, looking for werewolf dens.
The trip to Woodston doesn’t do much to allay our fears, because it’s three pages of utterly perfect perfectness that almost kill the novel dead. Everything is charming and lovely and everyone is on their super-best behavior, with the exception of the general who can’t help making excruciating little references to Catherine’s immediate future at this very house, which fortunately zing right over her head so there’s no harm done to the general perfectitude. There is, however, one slightly dodgy moment during dinner:
[Catherine] could not but observe that the abundance of the dinner did not seem to create the smallest astonishment in the general; nay, that he was even looking at the side-table for cold meat which was not there. His son and daughter’s observations were of a different kind. They had seldom seen him eat so heartily at any table but his own, and never before known him so little disconcerted by the melted butter’s being oiled.
The morning after Catherine’s return to the abbey, she gets the long anticipated letter from Isabella, and what a relief, the plot gets deliciously messy again. It’s quite a tour de force, too, beginning with Isabella’s usual “thousand apologies” for not answering any of Catherine’s letters, “but in this horrid place one can find time for nothing.” She swears she’s sat down to write Catherine every day, but was “always been prevented by some silly trifler or other.” Some silly trifler, you just know, whom she hung out the window and called out to until he noticed her.
Then come the goods. And you can almost admire the way she slips this in as though it’s the most casual goddamn thing in the world:
I am quite uneasy about your dear brother, not having heard from him since he went to Oxford; and am fearful of some misunderstanding. Your kind offices will set all right: he is the only man I ever did or could love, and I trust you will convince him of it. The spring fashions are partly down; and the hats are the most frightful you can imagine.
Immediately we realize that the Tilney siblings were right all along: there was no way their brother would seriously attach himself to a girl with no cash and no cachet. She was, for him, just a bit of fun. And now that he’s left Bath, Isabella is having one hell of a case of buyer’s remorse. Or rather, exchanger’s remorse, because her original purchase, James Morland, is the one she now realizes she should’ve hung on to.
Isabella goes on to pretty much confirm our conclusions.
I rejoice to say that the young man whom, of all others, I particularly abhor, has left Bath. You will know, from this description, I must mean Captain Tilney, who, as you may remember, was amazingly disposed to follow and tease me, before you went away. Afterwards he got worse, and became quite my shadow. Many girls might have been taken in, for never were such attentions; but I knew the fickle sex too well.
She’s such an exquisite comic creation; even as she builds a case for herself, she’s revealing what really happened—we barely have to read between the lines—as when, intending to blacken Captain Tilney’s character, she says: “He is the greatest coxcomb I ever saw, and amazingly disagreeable. The last two days he was always by the side of Charlotte Davis: I pitied his taste, but took no notice of him.” She keeps up this refrain, repeatedly saying things like, “I would not even look at him,” and “I would not have followed him for all the world.”
Such a contrast between him and your brother! Pray send me some news of the latter—I am quite unhappy about him; he seemed so uncomfortable when he went away, with a cold, or something that affected his spirits. I would write to him myself, but I have mislaid his direction; and, as I hinted above, am afraid he took something in my conduct amiss.
Guilt just oozes from every line, here…guilt, and panic. And she just keeps digging herself in deeper, and deeper, and deeper. She hasn’t been going out at all, she says, but forced herself to do so the night before; “I was determined they should not say I shut myself up because Tilney was gone.” Does she not hear herself?
The entire letter is so transparently manipulative that even Catherine—Catherine Morland—sees through it.
Its inconsistencies, contradictions, and falsehoods struck her form the very first. She was ashamed of Isabella, and ashamed of having ever loved her. Her professions of attachment were now as disgusting as her excuses were empty, and her demands impudent. “Write to James on her behalf! No, James would never hear Isabella’s name mentioned by her again.”
When Henry gets back from Woodston, Catherine keeps heaping it on—telling him, “So much for Isabella…She is a vain coquette, and her tricks have not answered. I do not believe she ever had any regard either for James or for me, and I wish I had never known her.” (To which Henry replies, “It will soon be as if you never had”.)
But she still can’t figure out the captain’s motives in all this. “Why should he pay her such attentions as to make her quarrel with my brother, and then fly off himself?” Henry, who knows his brother probably better than he’d care to, has a ready answer.
“He has his vanities as well as miss Thorpe, and the chief difference is, that, having a stronger head, they have not yet injured himself. If the effect of his behaviour does not justify him with you, we had better not seek the cause.”
This is the kind of psychological intricacy that evades almost all of Austen’s imitators. As is the sequence that follows, in which Catherine notes with relief that there’s been no harm done, “because I do not think Isabella has any heart to lose. But, suppose he had made her very much in love with him?” Henry’s got the perfect reply to that, too.
“But we must first suppose Isabella to have had a heart to lose—consequently to have been a very different creature; and, in that case, she would have met with very different treatment.”
I gotta say, Henry is batting a thousand lately. It almost makes me kinda like the guy. Except I can’t help picturing him, slouched in a chair and buffing his nails with a gilt-handled buffer while he casually tosses off these little atom bombs of insight.
A few days later, the general is obliged to leave Northanger for a week in London, and his departure “gave Catherine the first experimental conviction that a loss may be sometimes a gain.” With the paterfamilias gone, the three younger people are free to play loud music, smoke loco weed, and play toboggan with sofa cushions on the staircase…or at any rate the Regency equivalent to all that. Everything’s bright and happy and la-de-goddamn-da, until Catherine, not yet entirely having purged herself of a tendency towards gloom, hits on something to be miserable about.
“…[S]he was now in the fourth week of her visit; before the general came home, the fourth week would be turned, and perhaps it might seem an intrusion if she stayed much longer…she very soon resolved to speak to Eleanor about it at once, propose going away, and be guided by the manner in which her proposal might be taken.”
The manner in which her proposal is taken is, as you might imagine, of the jaw-drops-to-chest variety. Why, Miss Tilney wants to know, would she even think about going so soon? “Oh! Because she had been there so long.”
“Nay, if you can use such a word, I can urge you no farther. If you think it long—”
“Oh! No, I do not indeed. For my own pleasure, I could stay with you as long again.” And it was directly settled that, till she had, her leaving them was not even to be thought of.
This business takes up the better part of a page, and you get a sense that maybe the wheels of Austen’s bicycle are wobbling a bit; it seems like trivial stuff to get so deeply into.
Except, of course, by this point in her career Austen is without peer in narrative structure and pacing, and we will soon see that the scene we’ve just been through has direct bearing on how we respond to a much more significant one coming up. Our lesson, then: Shut your pie hole and trust J.A.
Catherine is relieved, because staying on at Northanger will allow her to figure out exactly what the hell is going on between her and you-know-who. “She did—almost always—believe that Henry loved her,” and that “almost” is pretty much the whole story; because Henry only shines his Henry-ness on her when he feels like goosing his ego a bit, or is sufficiently bored to want to amuse himself by dispensing pellets to his favorite lab rat. But alas, Henry’s called back to Woodston, so Catherine’s going to have to wait for any more clarity on that particular issue.
His absence means that she and Eleanor are alone at the abbey, which gets you thinking of all sorts of interesting ways the novel might go…most, since we postmillennials are a depraved and predictable bunch, involving pillow fights in underwear. But those hopes are dashed when, that very night, at the late hour of eleven o’clock, the girls hear a carriage crunching up the drive. Eleanor says this must be Captain Tilney, “whose arrival was often as sudden, if not quite so unseasonable,” and Catherine, who’d rather eat sawdust than see him again, flits upstairs to her room.
She waits there for Eleanor to come and tell her what’s brought the captain home; but after half an hour passes with no Eleanor, she starts to wonder, the hell?
Then, unexpectedly, a U-turn back to Gothic.
At that moment, Catherine thought she heard her step in the gallery, and listened for its continuance; but all was silent. Scarcely, however, had she convicted her fancy of error, when the noise of something moving close to her door made her start; it seemed as if someone was touching the very doorway—and in another moment a slight motion of the lock proved that some hand must be on it.
Catherine “trembles”…but then remembers she doesn’t let crap like this scare her anymore, and bucks up. And just as well, too, because when she opens the door, it’s only Eleanor. Eleanor, who has either forgotten the complicated mechanics of your basic doorknob, or who has hesitated to enter for some other reason. Of course, it’s Curtain Number Two.
She’s come, she says, on “such and errand!...How shall I tell you! Oh! How shall I tell you!” This sounds suspiciously like the beginning of a song, and briefly brings the mind the possibility of Northanger Abbey: The Musical. But then she returns to less syncopated speech, and reveals that the recent arrival wasn’t the captain but the general, whose “unlooked for return was enough to make Catherine’s heart sink, and for a few moments she hardly supposed there were anything worse to be told.” But is there ever.
“You are too good, I am sure, to think the worse of me for the part I am obliged to perform,” Eleanor says, wringing her hands. “I am indeed a most unwilling messenger.” By now we’re seriously alarmed, so you can imagine how Catherine feels. I bet she’s thinking, Why couldn’t this have happened before I gave up melodrama? It would’ve been so bloody perfect. But whatever she’s thinking, she doesn’t have time to linger on it, as Eleanor goes babbling on:
“After what has so lately passed, so lately been settled between us—how joyfully, how thankfully on my side!—as to your continuing here as I hoped for many, many weeks longer, how can I tell you that your kindness is not to be accepted—and that the happiness your company has hitherto given us is to be repaid by—But I must not trust myself with words. My dear Catherine, we are to part. My father has recollected an engagement that takes our whole family away on Monday. We are going to Lord Longtown’s, near Hereford, for a fortnight. Explanation and apology are equally impossible. I cannot attempt either.”
Eleanor is so busted up by having to deliver this bizarre news, that Catherine finds herself in the strange position of consoling her—telling her hey, no biggie, everything ends, and a prior engagement takes precedence and yadda yadda. “I need not go before you do, you know,” she adds reassuringly. “Do not be distressed, Eleanor, I can go on Monday very well…The general will send a servant with me, I dare say, half the way—and then I shall soon be at Salisbury, and then I am only nine miles from home.” And nine miles are nothing. She can walk those in under a month, subsisting on berries and wild game she kills with her hatpin.
But no, even that rosy view of the catastrophe is shattered by Eleanor’s next blow.
“But—how can I tell you?—tomorrow morning is fixed for your leaving us, and not even the hour is left to your choice; the very carriage is ordered, and will be here at seven o’clock, and no servant will be offered you.”
Catherine sat down, breathless and speechless.
This is a pretty ripping scandal for Austen; it’s been a while since she’s delivered a sucker-punch of this magnitude. And we’re enjoying the hell out of it, because we’re really in the dark here; we don’t know what’s going on. Neither does Eleanor, who wails about what Catherine’s parents are going to think of her family, having basically given their daughter the bum’s rush and booted her home with barely a moment’s notice, and no escort. And who knows, maybe set the dogs after her to make sure she doesn’t dawdle.
Catherine naturally wonders what she’s done to offend General Tilney. Eleanor reassures her that, to the best of her knowledge, “you can have given him no just cause of offence.”
“He is certainly greatly, very greatly discomposed; I have seldom seen him more so. His temper is not happy, and something has now occurred to ruffle it in an uncommon degree; some disappointment, some vexation, which just at this moment seems important, but which I can hardly suppose you to have any concern in, for how is it possible?”
This is cracking good stuff, and even on rereading the novel—when you know what’s behind this incident and what brought it on—it’s very pleasurable to immerse yourself again in the sheer head-banging unfathomableness of it, and to hear Eleanor, up to now a pretty taciturn kid, keening like a mourner at an Irish wake: “…a journey of seventy miles, to be taken post by you, at your age, alone, unattended!”
Catherine, again showing how much she’s matured, once again consoles Eleanor, and tries—a little ridiculously—to frame the whole thing as no big whoop. “Oh, the journey is nothing. Do not think about that. And if we are to part, a few hours sooner or later, you know, makes no difference. I can be ready by seven. Let me be called in time.” But as soon as Eleanor leaves, she has a nice, slobbery, girly breakdown. Which, admittedly, she’s earned.
Turned from the house, and in such a way! Without any reason that could justify, any apology that could atone for the abruptness, the rudeness, nay, the insolence of it. Henry at a distance—not able even to bid him farewell…And all this by such a man as General Tilney, so polite, so well-bred, and heretofore so particularly fond of her! It was as incomprehensible as it was mortifying and grievous…The manner in which it was done so grossly uncivil, hurrying her away without any reference to her own convenience, or allowing her even the appearance of choice as to the time or mode of traveling; of two days, the earliest fixed on, and of that almost the earliest hour, as if resolved to have her gone before he was stirring in the morning…What could all this mean but an intentional affront?
She can’t sleep, of course; and she’s cognizant of the irony that she couldn’t sleep on her first night in this room, either, although “how different now the source of her inquietude from what it had been then—how mournfully superior in reality and substance!”
Eleanor shows up at her door after six, and there’s an awkward scene where she tries to help Catherine pack up, but Catherine’s got it all in hand, plus what does Miss Eleanor Tilney know about packing a trunk?...Still, busy hands keep them from having to say much, and silence seems the only bearable means of getting through it.
Then there’s a breakfast where Catherine doesn’t eat, and then the carriage is at the door, and the whole appalling, shameful business suddenly becomes very, very real; and Catherine has one fantastically human moment, when—lacking anyone else to take out her feelings on, she turns on Eleanor and snarks hard.
“You must write to me, Catherine,” [Eleanor] cried…”Let me have the satisfaction of knowing that you are safe at Fullerton, and have found your family well, and then, till I can ask for your correspondence as I ought to do, I will not expect more. Direct to me at Lord Longtown’s, and, I must ask it, under cover to Alice.”
“No, Eleanor, if you are not allowed to receive a letter from me, I am sure I had better not write. There can be no doubt of my getting home safe.”
Again: this is the Austen her imitators and wannabes can never touch. This kind of lightning-swift psychological detail is the mark of genius. Of course Catherine almost immediately relents and says she willwrite, but that single moment where she tries to claw some dignity from the flesh and blood of the only sacrificial victim available, and never mind that it’s her friend…that’s the difference between a good book, and a great one.
Eleanor then proves how much she warrants Catherine’s friendship by bringing up the uncomfortable subject of money, which until this moment Catherine hadn’t even considered; and of course she hasn’t got any. Eleanor lends her enough to get her home in comfort, and then they walk out together, accompanied only by the elephant in the room—Henry, whose name has not yet been mentioned. With time growing short, Catherine “with quivering lips just made it intelligible that she left ‘her kind remembrance for her absent friend.’ ” And then she goes all blubbery again, and leaps into the carriage so as not to embarrass herself in front of Eleanor, who’s probably blubbery too, but you know…girls.
And that’s where we’ll leave her; in an honest-to-God, crack-of-dawn flight from shame and mystery, scorned and alone, like an actual goddamn heroine from one of her creaky, crappy doorstop novels.
Gotta watch out what you wish for, man. Ammiright?

Northanger Abbey, chapters 22-24

I mentioned earlier that I’ve come to approve of the title given this novel by Austen’s publisher after her death. Her own title, Catherine, certainly seems a better choice on first glance; the novel is, after all, principally about its heroine and the ways in which reading novels has rendered her nearly incapable of conducting herself rationally in the real world. Most of the story is set in Bath; the scene doesn’t even shift to the titular locale until nearly the two-thirds mark.
And yet Northanger Abbey, for that reason an odd and rather ungainly title for the novel, strikes me on further consideration as a likably playful one—impish, even. In its pages, Austen continually mocks the genre conventions of the gothic romances Catherine is so fond of. And one of those conventions was to name a novel after the imposing, unsettling, medieval pile of bricks at its center. To wit: The Castle of Otranto. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Eisen Castle.
And so, Northanger Abbey. What the publisher was doing, I think, is being deliberately ironic. By grafting this title onto Austen’s coming-of-age novel, he was inviting the reader to come to it with gothic-romance expectations—expectations that would be tweaked and mocked and overturned again, and again, and again.
Take the present moment. When we left Catherine, she’d just about frightened herself into incontinence by investigating, in the dead of night, a large chest in her room at the abbey, in which she found a mysterious sheaf of papers—echoing a horror story Henry Tilney had told her earlier in the day, in which the discovered papers began, “Oh! Thou—whomsoever thou mayst be, into whose hands these memoirs of the wretched Matilda may fall” (not one for subtlety, Henry Tilney). Catherine is convinced the papers she’s just found will contain something similarly electrifying. But in her flibbertigibbet fussing with them she accidentally douses her candle, and—left literally in the dark—she has to tremble all night in anticipation of what the morning sunlight will reveal.
And what thar morning sunlight reveals—when it finally arrives, and Catherine leaps out of bed and pounces on the pages, probably leaving a little trail of drool behind her—is pretty jaw-droppingly disappointing.
Could it be possible, or did not her senses play her false? 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. She seized another sheet, and saw the same articles with little variation; a third, a fourth, and a fifth presented nothing new. Shirts, stockings, cravats, and waistcoats faced her in each.
Shirts, stockings, cravats, and waistcoats are a pretty far cry from the secrets, scandals, depravities, and infamies she’d hoped to discover. She is, we’re told, “humbled to the dust.” This is the second time she’s made an idiot of herself by going all Lara Croft over some innocent item of furniture in her room, and she suddenly realizes what a prize ass she’s been.
To suppose that a manuscript of many generations back could have remained undiscovered in a room such as that, so modern, so habitable!—or that she should be the first to possess the skill of unlocking a cabinet, the key of which was open to all!
She does wonder, however, why the lock had been so dramatically hard to open (like it was willfully resisting her) when now, in the clear light of morning, it works perfectly fine. The mortifying answer hits her like a pie in the face: because when she’d first approached it, it had been unlocked. So when she’d turned the key to open it, she was unknowingly actually locking it. And then the pulling and twisting and trying again that followed, till she tumbled the lock back…well, let’s just say it wasn’t her finest moment, and leave it at that.
She heads down to breakfast, where she finds Henry already tucking in. He hopes the storm didn’t keep her awake, and she, not wanting him to have any clue how she spent her first night under his roof but at the same time being “unequal to an absolute falsehood,” admits that the wind kept her awake “a little”, and then immediately changes the subject with hilarious obviousness. “What beautiful hyacinths! I have just learnt to love a hyacinth!”
Well, you can’t say anything innocuous to Henry Tilney without him riffing on it like he’s every member of the Algonquin Round Table rolled into one. Especially if it’s a word like “hyacinth.” When he eventually comes back down to earth, he says he’s “pleased that you have learned to love a hyacinth. The mere habit of learning to love is the thing; and a teachableness of disposition in a young lady is a great blessing.” God, this guy is a douchebag.
Catherine is “saved the embarrassment of attempting an answer” by the appearance of the general, which is sort of like being saved from a fire by getting caught in a flash flood. Because where Henry can’t resist blabbing on at length to show off his cleverness, the general can’t resist blabbing on equally lengthily about how much superfine bling he has. When Catherine makes some cooing noises about the elegance of the table setting, he’s off and running, bragging about what came from where and for how much.
…But this was quite an old set, purchased two years ago. The manufacture was much improved since that time; he had seen some beautiful specimens when last in town, and had he not been perfectly without vanity of that kind, might have been tempted to order a new set. He trusted, however, that an opportunity might ere long occur of selecting one—though not for himself. Catherine was probably the only one of the party who did not understand him.
This is our first indication that this visit of Catherine’s to the abbey isn’t merely for the companionship of Miss Tilney, but also as a sort of trial run to moving her in permanently as Henry Tilney’s baby mama. Catherine’s not the sharpest pin in the cushion, admittedly, but it’s no wonder the general’s sly reference sailed over her head like a shot put. After all, she hasn’t experienced much in the way of tenderness, or even friendliness, from either of the Tilney men. Henry principally likes to amuse himself at her expense, and the general treats her like she’s a journalist who’s writing a profile of him for the Times.
After breakfast Henry leaves to spend a few days at his own house, Woodston, where he has a clerical living; and when Catherine, naturally curious about this house, asks whether it’s pretty, the general turns the question over to his daughter. “What say you, Eleanor? Speak your opinion, for ladies can best tell the taste of ladies in regard to places as well as men.” Then, not giving Eleanor a nanosecond to get a word in, he launches right into a description of the place himself.
After reassuring Catherine (not that she has any idea of it being meant as reassurance) that it’s not by any means a bad little piece of property, he concludes by insisting that Henry doesn’t really need the living or anything, oh no. But the general insists that he have some profession. “I am sure your father, Miss Morland, would agree with me in thinking it expedient to give every young man some employment.” He seems eager for her not to think that money is an issue for this clan.
Once again, his motives for saying this completely elude Catherine. This ardent novel reader, so well versed in what Austen earlier called the “work in which the greatest powers of mind are displayed” and which boasts a “thorough knowledge of human nature”, is completely incapable of seeing General Tilney as an actual human being whose speech and behaviors are indications of his character. What she does see when she looks at him is completely colored by garish fantasy. But we’ll get to that shortly.
The general now remembers that “something had been said” the night before about showing Catherine the house, and he decides by golly no time like the present. Despite Catherine having hoped for the tour to be just her and Eleanor Tilney, she shrugs and figures what the hell, “for she had been already eighteen hours in the abbey, and had seen only a few of its room.” And she’s all gung ho for checking out the crypts, vaults, cellars, tower keeps, and anywhere else where something nice and sordid and malevolent might have occurred.
But the general, with his unerring talent for zeroing in on the opposite of whatever Catherine is thinking, decides that of course Miss Morland would prefer to begin her tour with the grounds. Miss Morland, who we’re beginning to think is both agoraphobic and claustrophilic, goes rigid at the idea. And then we get this superbly funny passage that tells us the general is just as lousy at judging Catherine by her expressions and gestures, as she is at judging him.
“Which did [the general’s] daughter think would accord with her fair friend’s wishes? But he thought he could discern. Yes, he could certainly read in Miss Morland’s eyes a judicious desire of making use of the present smiling weather. But when did she judge amiss? The abbey would always be safe and dry. He yielded implicitly, and would fetch his hat and attend them in a moment.”
Anyway, Catherine is hauled outside for an extended tramp around the abbey’s lawns and shrubberies with the general droning on the entire time. I like to picture her getting her shawl snagged on a bramble, or her shoe stuck in a bog, or her bonnet knocked off by a low-lying branch. But that’s just me. The most Austen will say of her misery is that, without Henry there to tell her what to think, “she should not know what was picturesque when she saw it.”
The silver lining is that, from outside, she finally gets a good, clear, exterior view of the abbey, and she’s pretty impressed by its Gothic splendor.
Catherine had seen nothing to compare with it; and her feelings of delight were so strong, that without waiting for any better authority, she boldly burst forth in wonder and praise. The general listened with assenting gratitude; and it seemed as if his own estimation of Northanger had waited unfixed until that hour.
This whole chapter just cracks me up. General Tilney is turning out to be an absolutely first-rate Austen monster. Here he is again, dragging the girls through the gardens, possibly by their hair at this point, and confessing that, “without an ambition of that sort himself—without any solicitude about it—he did believe them to be unrivalled in the kingdom” and then complaining about the great “vexations” that come with keeping so superfine a garden as this, and wouldn’t Mr. Allen agree, don’t you think? Catherine? Hm? Catherine informs him that “Mr. Allen did not care about the garden, and never went into it.”
With a triumphant smile of self-satisfaction, the general wished he could do the same, for he never entered his, without being vexed in some way or other, by its falling short of his plan.
“How were Mr. Allen’s succession-houses worked?” describing the nature of his own as they entered them.
“Mr. Allen had only one small hot-house, which Mrs. Allen had the use of for her plants in winter, and there was a fire in it now and then.”
“He is a happy man!” said the general, with a look of very happy contempt.
This is Jane Austen in top form. She’s just slaughtering us here.
Finally, the time comes to return to the house, and Miss Morland accordingly turns down a “narrow winding path through a thick grove of old Scotch firs”—only to be brought up short by her father. Why is she headed that way? She confesses it’s a favorite walk of hers, and she believes the quickest route to the house, too. The general is against it; it looks damp. But Catherine, “struck by its gloomy aspect, and eager to enter it, could not, even by the general’s disapprobation, be kept from stepping forward.”
As we’ve seen, the general isn’t too proficient at reading Catherine’s implications; but this straining against the leash is too obvious for even his powers of delusion to misinterpret. Realizing he’s beaten, he lets the girls go, excusing himself: “The rays of the sun were not too cheerful for him,” (love that) and he “would meet them by another course.” Once he’s out of their hair, Catherine feels so liberated she can barely keep from cartwheeling, and “began to talk with easy gaiety of the delightful melancholy which such a grove inspired.”
When Miss Tilney mentions that this was her mother’s favorite walk, as well as her own, the subject turns, naturally, to the late Mrs. T. “Her death must have been a great affliction!” Catherine says, in one of her more no-freakin’-kidding moments, and Miss Tilney admits she felt it very keenly; she was only thirteen at the time. Catherine, with all the tact of a steamroller, flattens the poor girl with questions: “Was she a very charming woman? Was she handsome? Was there any picture of her in the abbey? And why had she been so partial to that grove? Was it from dejection of spirits?” And where is she buried, and is there a headstone, and what dress was she buried in, and can we dig her up?
But there’s something developing in the back of her mind, an idea coalescing, that she can’t share with her friend—which is a conviction that the marriage of the general and Mrs. Tilney was not a happy one, and that he’d been a regular brute to her. Catherine’s evidence? “He did not love her walk: could he therefore have loved her?” In a lot of ways, she’s the quintessential teenage girl.
Also: Catherine learns (by incessant questioning, of course) that the late Mrs. T’s portrait does not hang in the general’s room, as you’d expect with a grieving husband, but in his daughter’s. So that’s it, the case is all stitched up: the general was a cruel monster who hated his wife and drove her to the grave. (And then laughed, laughed, I tell you!) With this new certainty percolating in her brain, Catherine can barely stand to be in the same postal code as the general, much less the same room, which is kinda too bad, because she is seriously stuck with him.
Back indoors, the second part of the tour begins with the general showing Catherine a magnificent drawing-room, “used only with company of consequence”—not that he cares about such things.It’s very grand, and the general meticulously details the super-deluxe aspect of everything in it and totes up how much it cost, and Catherine’s eyes basically glaze over in titanic boredom; “she cared for no furniture of a more modern date than the fifteenth century.” And preferably the kind that doubled as torture devices. A hanging planter that also serves as an iron maiden?—that’s the kind of thing she’s keen to see.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the abbey seems clean, well-lit, distressingly modern, and very well run. As the tour continues and she realizes she’s seen more than half of the rooms in the place, and not oneof them stained with the blood of heretics, she goes into a real funk.
It was some relief, however, that they were to return to the rooms in common use, by passing through a few of less importance, looking into the court, which, with occasional passages, not wholly unintricate, connected the different sides; and she was further soothed in her progress by being told that she was treading what had once been a cloister, having traces of cells pointed out, and observing several doors that were neither opened nor explained to her…
That’s more like it! And yet, even these rooms abruptly connect to a billiard room, the general’s own room, and Henry’s too. Catherine isn’t certain how that happened, probably because she’s wasn’t paying attention, preferring to listen for the wails of disgraced nuns whose souls might be trapped within the walls. But the jolt from exotic antiquity to modern mundanity is a shock, and it gets worse on the next leg of the tour, when the general shows her the offices and stable-yard. “All that was venerable ceased here”, in her opinion. This is a newly constructed wing of the abbey, built upon the foundations of a decaying old one that the general’s father had had pulled down. You can pretty much guess our goth-girl’s opinion on that.
Catherine could have raved at the hand which had swept away what must have been beyond the value of all the rest, for the purposes of mere domestic economy; and would willingly have been spared the mortification of a walk through such scenes so fallen, had the general allowed it…
Of course the general will allow no such thing. He’s bsaically the cruise director from hell.
They reach the end of a long gallery, and Miss Tilney suddenly veers to the left and makes as if to open some doors—only to have her wrist slapped by the general, because, ahem, who’s in charge here…?
Had not Miss Morland already seen all that could be worth her notice?—And did [Miss Tilney] not suppose her friend might be glad of some refreshment after so much exercise. Miss Tilney drew back directly, and the heavy doors were closed upon the mortified Catherine, who, having seen, in a momentary glance beyond them, a narrower passage, more numerous openings, and symptoms of a winding staircase, believed herself at last within the reach of something worth her notice…The general’s evident desire of preventing such an examination was an additional stimulant.
(Let me just pause a moment to say that in reading any great writer, there will always be moments when some mere phrase or passage will stop you in its tracks with its effortless genius, and “symptoms of a winding staircase” serves that purpose for me.)
Catherine, well-meaning idiot that she is, has seized on the hint of secrecy here as the foundation on which she’ll feed like a hyena on a zebra carcass. She can’t help herself; it’s a flat-out pathology. Even though she’s managed to completely humiliate herself twice in the course of her first twenty-four hours under this roof, she’s chomping at the bit to do so again, and without a shred of self-awareness. In fact, she even observes to herself that “her fancy, though it had trespassed lately once or twice, could not mislead her here”, because, I guess, Reasons.
When she finds out that the room Miss Tilney had been attempting to show her was the one in which her mother had died, Catherine’s delusions get an extra goosing. Of course the general wouldn’t want to enter that room—had probably never entered it since the his wife’s decease. It would leave him “to the stings of conscience”, which presumably are pest-controlled in the rest of the house. Catherine begs to be shown the room, and Miss Tilney agrees to show it to her, with the understanding that this must be when the general is out.
Meantime, Catherine asks for details of Mrs. Tilney’s death. “You were with her, I suppose, to the last?” she asks.
“No,” said Miss Tilney, sighing; “I was unfortunately from home. Her illness was sudden and short; and before I arrived it was all over.”
Catherine’s blood ran cold with the horrid suggestions which naturally sprang from these words. Could it be possible? Could Henry’s father—? And yet how many were the examples to justify even the blackest suspicions!
I love the way Austen here explicitly credits (or rather, blames) Catherine’s depraved hunch on novel reading…this, in a work that explicitly aims to be a defense of novel-reading. Austen’s cognitive dissonance is just delicious; and, I’m fairly certain, deliberate.
From this point on, Catherine watches the general with a keen eye, and everything he does or says—and admittedly, he is a moody, unsettled kind of dude—strikes her as evidence of his being guilty of a monstrous crime. She begins building a case against him in her head, and—give her points for originality—the narrative she comes up with is a pretty wild one. She convinces herself, not that the general murdered his wife—but that he made up the story of her death from whole cloth. The probability is that “Mrs. Tilney yet lived, shut up for causes unknown, and receiving from the pitiless hands of her husband a nightly supply of coarse food”.
The suddenness of her reputed illness, the absence of her daughter, and probably of her other children, at the time—all favoured the supposition of her imprisonment. Its origin—jealousy perhaps, or wanton cruelty—was yet to be unravelled.
But if anyone can unravel it, it’s Catherine Morland, P.I. And baby, is she ever on the case, lurking and spying and teasing out clues like she’s got her own goddamn show on the WB.
And in the process she becomes increasingly invested in lurid certainties. It occurs to her, for instance, that on the tour of the house that very morning, she may well have passed “near the very spot of this unfortunate woman’s confinement—might have been within a few paces of the cell in which she languished out her days; for what part of the abbey could be more fitted for the purpose than that which yet bore the traces of monastic division?” That’s just the kind of gal Catherine is. Northanger has disappointed her by having only one small, unused area that conforms to her idea of what an abbey should be; but goddammit, she’s gonna make sure that that one, small unused area has an abbey-worthy scandal attached to it, even if she has to make it up out of total cray-cray from her own Swiss-cheese brain.
Occasionally a ray of light pierces her delusional miasma. “Catherine sometimes started at the boldness of her own surmises, and sometimes hoped or feared that she had gone too far; but they were supported by such appearances as made their dismissal impossible.” Impossible, you hear that? Because the general paces the drawing room at night, and his wife died suddenly, and her portrait is not in his room, therefore Murder. Only an imbecile wouldn’t see that.
More “evidence” comes on Sunday, when Catherine accompanies the family to services and there finds “a very elegant monument to the memory of Mrs. Tilney, which immediately fronted the family pew”, and which features a “highly strained epitaph, in which every virtue was ascribed to her by the inconsolable husband, who must have been in some way or other her destroyer,” which brings her to tears.
Catherine is amazed that the general can face this monument to his heinous guilt and yet “maintain so elevated an air,” and yet really, it shouldn’t be that big a surprise to her.
She could remember dozens who had persevered in every possible vice, going on from crime to crime, murdering whomsoever they chose, without any feeling of humanity or remorse; till a violent death or a religious retirement closed their black career.
These “dozens” she’s remembering are character is novels, of course; so that the walls between fiction and reality have pretty much dissolved for her. The behaviors of dastardly characters conjured up for public entertainment, are now held up as proofs of what flesh-and-blood men are capable of.
The next morning finds the general out of the house—probably to prey on village virgins, or raise an army of orcs to enslave Middle Earth, or something else he couldn’t comfortably do on a Sunday—so Catherine convinces Miss Tilney that now, now, now is the time, and they go slinking off to the late Mrs. Tilney’s room like the Olsen Twins in a Disney Channel mystery. And here Austen descends into genuine, tub-thumping, non-ironic gothic-novel pacing, just to show that she can, in case anybody’s wondering.
[Catherine’s] agitation as they entered the great gallery was too much for any endeavour at discourse; she could only look at her companion. Eleanor’s countenance was dejected, yet sedate; and its composure spoke her inured to all the gloomy objects to which they were advancing. Again she passed through the folding doors, again her hand was upon the important lock, and Catherine, hardly able to breathe, was turning to close the former with fearful caution, when the figure, the dreaded figure of the general himself at the further end of the gallery, stood before her! The name of “Eleanor” at the same moment, in his loudest tone, resounded through the building, giving to his daughter the first intimation of his presence, and to Catherine terror on terror.
Catherine makes a run for it—possibly in the manner of a cartoon character, with her legs pumping away in one place for a few seconds before her feet actually gain traction—and locks herself in her room. Austen doesn’t say whether she also pulls some furniture over to add an additional bar to entry, but she probably doesn’t, because as we’ve seen, Catherine can’t handle any furniture in her room without free-associating it with ancient mayhem.
She remains there, trembling, for “at least an hour” and uncertain that “she should ever have courage to go down again”—though fearing that at any moment she’ll be sent for by the vengeful general, who must now be aware that she suspects him of infamy, and will therefore have to tie her to the railway tracks, and also cover her with the kind of honey favored by fire ants in case the trains are running late. Finally she hears a carriage crunching up the drive, and she feels sufficiently safe in going back downstairs, presumably because even the general is too genteel to ravage her in front of company.
The general, to her surprise, amiably introduces her to the visitors as “the friend of his daughter, in a complimentary style,” and then Miss Tilney comes up and whispers that “My father only wanted me to answer a note,” so that Catherine’s hopes of surviving to see another sunrise beef up considerably. So much so that she decides dammit, she’s going to see the late Mrs. T’s room, no matter who or what gets in her way. Though probably the best course of action is to go there alone, so as not to risk getting anyone else in hot water. Also, without Miss Tilney along, she’ll be freer to look for signs of…you know.
It would be impossible to explain to Eleanor the suspicions, from which the other had, in all likelihood, been hitherto happily exempt; nor could she therefore, in her presence, search for those proofs of the general’s cruelty which however they might yet have escaped discovery, she felt confident of somewhere drawing forth, in the shape of some fragmented journal, continued to the last gasp.
You’d think, since the sum total of her career as a proto-Sherlock has been the discovery of bed sheets and a laundry bill, she’d be a little more humble in her expectations; but no, she’s like a gambler who’s absolutely sure the next roll of the dice will bring the big payout. So on the next day, “her courage high”, she sets out.
There’s more pulse-thrumming narration to ratchet up the suspense; but ultimately when she reaches her goal, instead of finding a dark, squalid sick room with heavy curtains and an aura of decay, she confronts a large, well-lit, tastefully appointed room with “a bright Bath stove, mahogany wardrobes, and neatly painted chairs”—a precious little nook of a room. A goddamn My Little Pony of a room.
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’s reached the three-strikes-you’re-out stage, but at least, you think, she’s finally seen sense. Ah, but no!—when Catherine admits she’s been “grossly mistaken in everything else”, she doesn’t mean grossly mistaken to have sought out the diabolical in the histories of actual human people who live actual real lives on the actual planet Earth. No, she just means she’s been grossly mistaken in thinking it’s going to be so easyto get the goods. “No, whatever might have been the general’s crimes, he had certainly too much wit to let them sue for detection.” She’s going to have to work harder, and probably send away for a Kidz Labs fingerprint kit by mail order.
But for the moment she’s “sick of exploring” and starts back to her room, where she can flounce and sulk and pout all day, and maybe read a novel or two for more mental and psychological improvement. But she hasn’t got very far before she hears footsteps not her own. Uh-oh. “To be found here, even by a servant, would be unpleasant; but by the general (and he seemed always at hand when least wanted), much worse.”
Much much worse, of course, would be Henry Tilney, so naturally who turns a corner but…Henry Tilney, back home earlier than expected. At the sight of him, she exclaims, “Good God!” which is about as salty as speech ever gets in Austen, and is never a sign of anything good to come. Then she asks, “How came you here? How came you up that staircase?”
His answer, of course, is basically hello, I livehere, but while we’re on the subject, the hell are you doing here, lurking like a rodent? Catherine confesses she’s been to see his mother’s room. He’s surprised by her interest, but even more by her solitude, asking whether “Eleanor leave[s] you to find your way into all the rooms in the house by yourself?”
“Oh! no; she showed me over the greatest part on Saturday—and we were coming here to these rooms—but only”—dropping her voice—“your father was with us.”
“And that prevented you,” said Henry, earnestly regarding her. “Have you looked into all the rooms in that passage?”
“No, I only wanted to see— Is it not very late? I must go and dress.”
Ha! Smooth attempt at changing the subject there, Catherine; too bad Henry scuttles it by pointing out it’s only a quarter past four. Back to the subject at hand:
“…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 wonder that Eleanor should not take it for her own. She sent you to look at it, I suppose?”
Catherine has to admit she hasn’t. “It has been your own doing entirely?” Henry shakes his head in awe; he can only conclude that 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,” and he goes on to compliment Catherine on the “fervent, venerating tenderness” which prompted her visit, and maybe he’s suddenly even looking at her in a different light. Or, rather, just looking at her in any light.
But she goes and screws that pooch but good, by admitting her real motives. There was curiosity in the room for her, she says. Mrs. Tilney “dying so suddenly…and you—none of you being at home—and your father, I thought—perhaps had not been very fond of her.”
Henry’s just a tad staggered by this, and even more so when he begins to realize that Catherine is inferring “perhaps the probability of some negligence…of something still less pardonable.” He draws himself up to his full height in indignation and hammers her with an exhaustive and withering account of his mother’s entirely innocent death (which he was home for, by the way), and concludes with one of the most famous humblings in all of Austen—an unrelenting take-down that leaves Catherine a pile of quivering protoplasm by its final denouncing syllable.
“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 neighborhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?”
How can Catherine possibly recover from a flaming like that?...Well, remember the old maxim, if you want relief from a headache, have someone stamp on your foot? Austen will be putting it to the test next time ’round. Good times!

Northanger Abbey, chapters 19-21

It’s easy enough to tell what makes Jane Austen percolate: just pay attention to what she turns her full attention to, and what she dismisses. The marriage game, for instance: she loves to set up an elaborate obstacle course for her would-be lovers, and to follow them through it as she jabs and pokes them with sticks; she’s a gleeful torturer that way. But when they finally reach the other side and fall into each other’s arms, she basically goes meh. The more ecstatic the commingling of hearts, the less she could give a good goddamn. She usually dashes off an obligatory line or two, then cuts bait.
We’re reaching a similar point here. Austen has taken great care to set up a simmering romantic triangle between three of her characters—James Morland, Isabella Thorpe, and Captain Tilney—and is stirring it up so that it’s all nice and bubbling and ready to start spewing grease all over the narrative kitchen. But she’s more interested in establishing the inevitability of such disasters than she is about seeing them actually go Krakatoa. As witness: she’s about to move Catherine Morland, whose point of view is the only one available in this novel, offstage—so that she won’t witness the blowup itself, just the reverberations of its calamitous kaboom. Austen has done this kind of thing many times before before: in Sense and Sensibility, with Edward Ferrars and Lucy Steele; in Pride and Prejudice, with Lydia and Wickham; in Mansfield Park, with Maria Bertram, Henry Crawford, and Mr. Rushworth; and in Emma, with Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill. The firestorm of these scandals is missed entirely by the heroine of each novel, who hears about it only by second hand. Clearly Austen is more interested in the exquisite tension of dangling a character over the precipice, than she is about the visceral thrill of actually watching him drop. Where, after all, is the subtlety in that? The irony? Agony, like ecstasy, bores her flat.
So we come in on Catherine, continuing to watch Isabella and Captain Tilney together, and growing more and more concerned about their behavior, which pushes the rum edge of impropriety. Isabella basically does everything short of displaying her actual rump to him, like a baboon in heat.
What could be meant by such unsteady conduct, what her friend could be at, was beyond her comprehension. Isabella could not be aware of the pain she was inflicting; but it was a degree of willful thoughtlessness which Catherine could not but resent. James was the sufferer. She saw him grave and uneasy...
She worries over Captain Tilney, too, because she’s persuaded he doesn’t—couldn’t possibly—know of Isabella’s engagement. If he did, he wouldn’t be shooting her all those smoldering bedroom looks or pawing the floor with his foot whenever she draws near.
Catherine drops a few hints to Isabella on how badly she’s wronging both men, but picking up hints isn’t Isabella’s specialty. (That would be picking up men.) She wears a special helmet of invisible tra-la-la that basically filters anything she doesn’t want to hear into sheer white noise.
Still, Catherine isn’t all that worried, because with the Tilneys soon leaving Bath, the captain will no longer be around to tempt Isabella. But then she learns that in fact the he’ll be staying on after the rest of his family decamps back to Gloucestershire. Panicking ever so slightly, Catherine decides on bold action: she goes to Henry Tilney, and begs him to tell his brother that Isabella is engaged. Henry’s reply: But he already knows that.
Catherine, gobsmacked, realizes this is more serious than she thought. She asks Henry, then, to convince his brother to join the rest of the family and leave Bath. Henry: “Persuasion is not at command; but pardon me, if I cannot even endeavour to persuade him. I have myself told him that Miss Thorpe is engaged. He knows what he is about, and must be his own master.”
When Catherine shoots back that Captain Tilney’s constant sniffing and grunting around Isabella is seriously bumming out Isabella’s, y’know, fiancé, Henry is ready with another terse reply:
“And are you sure it is my brother’s doing?”
“Yes, very sure.”
“It is my brother’s attentions to Thorpe, or Miss Thorpe’s admission of them, that gives the pain?”
“Is not it the same thing?”
“I think Mr. Morland would acknowledge a difference. No man is offended by another man’s admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.”
Catherine keeps pleading with him for another page or two (she’s a unrelenting little terrier, I’ll give her that), but he calmly deflects everything she says, like he’s made of Teflon or something. And then he turns it around and asks her whether her own behavior is all that it should be.
“Are you not carried a little too far? Would [James] thank you, either on his own account, or Miss Thorpe’s, for supposing that her affection, or at least her good behaviour, is only to be secured by her seeing nothing of Captain Tilney? Is he safe only in solitude? Or is her heart constant to him only when unsolicited by anyone else? He cannot think this—and you may be sure that he would not have you think it.”
So, yeah, these are all good points that can’t easily be argued. (Though, as we’ll see, he does screw up his batting average by reassuring her that after the Captain rejoins his regiment, “The mess-room will drink Isabella Thorpe for a fortnight, and she will laugh with your brother over poor Tilney’s passion for a month.”) Still, there’s a kind of curtness to Henry Tilney’s manner here—a paternalistic terseness. His object seems not so much to enlighten Catherine, as to just get her to stop talking. Maybe it’s my innate aversion to him acting as a filter; but try as I might, I can’t find anything in his manner here that reads like genuine solicitude. Or, hell, genuine anything.
Still, Catherine’s sufficiently persuaded (or perhaps shamed) by his arguments to put aside her fears; and when she last sees James and Isabella together, they seem canoodley enough to put her mind at rest. (Though “once [Isabella] gave her love a flat contradiction, and once she drew back her hand”—which Austen mentions so that we can read into it what Catherine won’t.)
Then Catherine says goodbye both to Isabella (“The embraces, tears, and promises of the parting fair ones may be fancied”, Austen tells us—meaning this kind of chirping girlishness bores her stupid as well) and to the Allens, and goes to stay the night with the Tilneys prior to setting forth with them for Gloucestershire as their guest. It’s super-swell being with the Tilney sibs, but once again it’s the general whose weirdly intense manner makes Catherine’s skin itch just a tiiiny bit.
His anxiety for her comfort—his continual solicitations that she would eat, and his often-expressed fears of her seeing nothing to her taste—though never in her life before had she beheld half such a variety on a breakfast-table—made it impossible for her to forget for a moment that she was a visitor. She felt utterly unworthy of such respect, and knew not how to reply to it.
In fact, the general’s such an uncomfortable guy to be around that his continual dressing-down of his number-one son makes Catherine actually pity Captain Tilney, which is not something she’d ever anticipated feeling. Wanting to push him down a coal hole, sure; but feeling sorry for him? That’s a mind-bender.
It was the first time of her being decidedly in his company, and she had hoped to be now able to form her opinion of him; but she scarcely heard his voice, while his father remained in the room; and even afterwards, so much were his spirits affected, she could distinguish nothing but these words, in a whisper to Eleanor, “How glad I shall be when you are all off.”
Several of them are off already, if you ask me.
We now come to the actual journey. The general and Henry travel in a curricle, with Miss Tilney and Catherine in a chaise behind. It’s pretty much a comedy of errors, with Catherine being so crammed in with the luggage that she can barely move, and then a long delay at a place called Petty France, where “there was nothing to be done but to eat without being hungry, and loiter about without anything to see”, although in their situation I myself would amuse myself greatly by seeing how many tasteless puns I could make of the name Petty France. But maybe General Tilney would have sucked even that spirit of fun right out of me, as he appears to do with the rest of the party.
Though the old boy does redeem himself by suggesting, when the party is finally okayed to get their pants from Petty France (see there?), that he and Catherine switch places, so that she can ride with Henry in the curricle and see “as much of the country as possible.” Catherine balks for one brief moment, remembering how disapproving Mr. Allen was of the idea of young women riding in open carriages, like brazen hoydens. But she gets over that pretty quickly, possibly deciding that if she’s going to be a hoyden, at least she’ll be a hoyden for Henry.
The experience of being driven by Henry Tilney proves to be very, very different from that of being driven by John Thorpe. Certainly it’s quieter. Though Henry, while less likely to talk at her instead of to her, still manages to find a way to have fun at her expense, as when their talk turns to the abbey, which, Catherine admits, she expects to find right in line with the kinds of places she’s read about in novels. Henry asks whether she’s truly prepared for the “horrors” of such a building. “Have you a stout heart? Nerves fit for sliding panels and tapestry?”
“Oh! yes—I do not think I should be easily frightened, because there would be so many people in the house—and besides, it has never been uninhabited and left deserted for years, and then the family come back to it unawares, without giving any notice, as generally happens.”
Sadistic Henry Tilney can’t resist a challenge like this. He proceeds to shatter her illusion of not being easily frightened, by scaring her bloomers down around her ankles with a long narrative about what she might find at Northanger Abbey—all delivered in broad daylight, on a sunny drive in an open carriage. “But you must be aware,” he begins, “that when a young lady is (by whatever means) introduced into a dwelling of this kind, she is always lodged apart from the rest of the family.”
“While they snugly repair to their own end of the house, she is formally conducted by Dorothy, the ancient housekeeper, up a different staircase, and along many gloomy passages, into an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before. Can you stand such ceremony as this?”
Catherine says sssshyeah I can. Hell, it’s what she’s hopingfor. So Henry goes on to elaborate what she’ll find in this isolated room—and it’s rather a bravura narrative, ranging over three pages and involving pretty much every staple of gothic fiction imaginable, from doors that won’t lock, funereal furnishings, violent storms and peals of thunder, and a wall hanging that seems to move of its own accord—behind which Catherine, in her dressing-gown, will find a secret door that leads into a series of small, vaulted rooms. “In one perhaps there may be a dagger, in another a few drops of blood, and in a third the remains of some instrument of torture; but there being nothing in all this out of the common way, and your lamp being nearly exhausted, you will return towards your own apartment.” And it’s on this retracing of her steps that she’ll encounter a piece of furniture she hadn’t noticed earlier.
“Impelled by an irresistible presentiment, you will eagerly advance to it, unlock its folding doors, and search into every drawer—but for some time without discovering anything of importance—perhaps nothing but a considerable hoard of diamonds. At last, however, by touching a secret spring, an inner compartment will open—a roll of paper appears—you seize it—it contains many sheets of manuscript—you hasten with the precious treasure into your own chamber, but scarcely have you been able to decipher ‘Oh! Thou—whomsoever thou mayst be, into whose hands these memoirs of the wretched Matilda may fall’—when your lamp suddenly expires in the socket, and leaves you in total darkness.”
By this time Catherine is writhing in a kind of terror that to me seems fairly obviously erotic. I mean, just consider the way she begs him to go on, go on, don’t stop, don’t stop. It’s certainly the weirdest seduction scene in all of Austen, and I might enjoy it more—there’s a lotthere to enjoy, certainly—if I weren’t fairly certain the person Henry Tilney is chiefly seducing with his performance, is himself.
As witness: he’s now “too much amused by the interest he had raised to be able to carry it farther”. Meaning, now that he’s proven what a genius he is at manipulating this impressionable young ditz, he doesn’t give a damn about leaving her twisting in the wind. Besides which, they’re now approaching the end of their journey.
Hearing this, Catherine grows “ashamed of her eagerness,” and tells him she doesn’t want to hear the end of his stupid story anyway, and besides she wasn’t even scared, and anyway she knows his sister would never put her in a room like that, and also she didn’t pee herself at all, the seats are just damp. So there.
The approach to the abbey is a frustrating one, with Catherine only managing to get split-second glimpses before the landscape rears up and gets in her way again. Austen’s teasing us here; we’re expecting another approaching-Pemberley or hey-look-Mansfield Park sequence—nature parting way to reveal the glories of some totally primo real estate to make the heroine gasp in admiration. But here, nature keeps throwing up obstacles, including, ultimately, “a sudden scud of rain, driving full in her face,” that keeps Catherine from getting any very clear image of the abbey, even when it’s smack-dab in front of her. And then, almost before she knows it, Henry’s swept her from the carriage, and she “was beneath the shelter of the old porch, and had even passed on to the hall, where her friend and the general were waiting to welcome her, without feeling one awful foreboding of future misery to herself, or one moment’s suspicion of any past scenes of horror being acted within the solemn edifice.” Poor kid can’t catch a break.
Even worse, she’s now ushered into the drawing-room, which is bright, neat, comfortable, and handsomely appointed; a perfectly pleasant room in every respect. “To an imagination which had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone-work, for painted glass, dirt and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing.”
After being allowed a few minutes to compose herself, Catherine’s hustled upstairs by Miss Tilney, and shown to her room, where she’s urged to freshen herself up as quickly as possible before coming down to dinner. Apparently, they’re running behind schedule, and the general is your basic Nazi about dining exactly at five o’clock. Not one minute past; not two minutes past, or three, or four; five o’clock exactly, goddammit, and oh yes, hope you like your room.
Catherine finds nothing to object to in it, as it happens. It’s nothing at all like the dank, claustrophobic chamber Henry described in his carriage-ride narrative; in fact it’s “altogether far from uncheerful.” But altogether far from uncheerful is pretty much the opposite of what Catherine’s got her heart set on, so after Miss Tilney leaves her, she looks around for something—anything—that might strike her with faintness and foreboding.
She finds it in “a large high chest, standing back in a deep recess on one side of the fireplace”, that causes her to gaze “in motionless wonder” while working up the courage to go and examine it.
She approaches it like a mongoose circling a cobra, examines it minutely for signs of mysterious horror, and then, “seizing, with trembling hands, the hasp of the lock, she resolved at all hazards to satisfy herself at least to its contents.” The lid doesn’t want to open, however—like it’s resisting giving up its secrets (or, y’know, just rusty)—and Catherine has only managed to pry it up a few inches when there’s a knock on the door. (I like to imagine her hair leaping right off her head, as in a cartoon.) It’s Miss Tilney’s maid, who’s been sent to help her get ready for dinner which is, ahem, at five o’clock in case you haven’t heard.
The maid’s intrusion “recalled [Catherine] to the sense of what she ought to be doing,” and she resolves to put aside her “anxious desire to penetrate this mystery” until a later time when five o’clock isn’t hanging over her head like the goddamn sword of Damocles.
But she’s so speedy with her toilette that she finds herself ready earlier than she expected; and so maybe “the impatience of her curiosity might be safely indulged. One moment surely might be spared”. So once again she leaps over to the chest, wrests it open, throws back the lid.
And instead of a mummified baby, or blood-soaked vestments, or a nest of poisonous vipers, she is shocked to discover…some white cotton bedsheets.
We’re now so far into farce, that of coursethis is the exact moment Miss Tilney enters the room, just to make sure Catherine understood that dinner is atfive o’clock, and finds her crouched over the open chest with a look on her face like she’s been caught sucking the blood of a peasant child.
Miss Tilney is completely unfazed. “That is a curious old chest, is not it?” she says...
“…It is impossible to say how many generations it has been here. How it came to be first put in this room I know not, but I have not had it moved, because I thought it might sometimes be of use in holding hats and bonnets. The worst of it is that its weight makes it difficult to open. In that corner, however, it is at least out of the way.”
But enough idle chatter; Miss Tilney hurries Catherine downstairs, where they arrive at the dinner table at something close to eleven seconds after the hour, and if Catherine is really looking for vengeful apparitions, well here’s General Tilney going all loup garou over their lateness.
He eventually calms down, but there are some pretty anxious moments early in the meal when Henry, his sister, and Catherine are basically wondering whether they’re the first, second, and dessert courses. And Catherine is so chastened by having caused all this heart-stopping awkwardness that you’d think she’s learned her lesson and won’t ever go snooping around looking for trap doors or iron maidens again.
But, come on. She’s staying at the house for several weeks, and has already proven herself incapable of restraining her curiosity for the ninety whole seconds it takes to change her dress and slap some perfume on her puss. I mean, give her another hour, she’ll be out behind the house with a shovel, excavating for corpses.
The dinner is a pretty awkward affair, most noticeably marked by the general—like John Thorpe before him—making some a sloppily disguised inquiry into the state of her Bath host’s finances. When Catherine comments on the size of his drawing-room, he supposes “that she must have been used to much better-sized apartments at Mr. Allen’s?” Catherine is possibly too skittish around the general to wonder why he’d ask such a thing; she just assures him that Mr. Allen’s dining-parlour is a mere broom closet compared to this one. And the general, having won this particular pissing match with his absent rival, feels he can now be gracious in victory. “Mr. Allen’s house, he was sure, must be exactly the true size for rational happiness.” Like General Tilney knows one freakin’ thing about rational happiness.
At the end of the evening Catherine retires, and what follows is a very long set piece—the funniest and justifiably the most famous in the novel—in which Catherine, alone in her room on a stormy night, lets her imagination gallop full-tilt right off a cliff.
The rain slams against the house, the eaves flap in the fury, the house creaks and moans in the wind, and Catherine is thrilled to feel like she’s in an abbey at last. Especially since she knows she can’t be in any real danger. “She had nothing to dread from midnight assassins or drunken gallants. Henry had certainly been only in jest when he had told her that morning.” Ahem, when isn’t Henry in jest?
“How much better this is,” said she, as she walked to the fender—“how much better to find a fire ready lit, than to have to wait shivering in the cold till all the family are in bed, as so many poor girls have been obliged to do, and then to have a faithful old servant frightening one by coming in with a faggot! How glad I am that Northanger is what it is! If it had been like some other places, I do not know that, in such a night as this, I could have answered for my courage; but now, to be sure, there is nothing to alarm one.”
She then basically tears the room apart searching desperately for something to alarm one.
She eventually finds it in “the appearance of a high, old-fashioned black cabinet, which, though in a situation conspicuous enough, had never caught her notice before.” Oooga-booga, baby. What makes it ever creepier is that it’s almost exactly like the piece of furniture that figured so dreadfully in Henry’s story from the carriage ride.
Catherine walks around it about four hundred times, inspecting it with her candle. And, no surprise, that ain’t enough to satisfy her curiosity. Not this Regency Nancy Drew, oh hell no. “The key was in the door, and she had a strange fancy to look into it; not, however, with the smallest expectation of finding anything, but it was so very odd, after what Henry had said. In short, she could not sleep till she examined it.” But when she gives it a try, she finds it pretty solidly stuck. Not giving up, she tries it from different angles and pressure points.
The door was still immovable. She paused a moment in breathless wonder. The wind roared down the chimney, the rain beat in torrents against the windows, and everything seemed to speak the awfulness of her situation. To retire to bed, however, unsatisfied on such a point, would be vain, since sleep must be impossible with the consciousness of a cabinet so mysteriously closed in her immediate vicinity.
Presumably, in the Morland household where Catherine grew up, cabinets were kept at all times with their doors yawning open.
She’s about to give up when, with “the determined celerity of hope’s last effort,” the thing suddenly pops…revealing “a double range of small drawers…with some larger drawers above them and below them; and in the centre, a small door, closed also with a lock and key, secured in all probability a cavity of importance.”
Whip, whip, whip, Catherine flies through every one of those drawers before you can say Bob’s your uncle, finding nothing, until only the door to the “cavity of importance” remains, and “it would be foolish not to examine it thoroughly while she was about it.” Yes, that’swhat would be foolish, Catherine. Nothing else you’ve done tonight; only that.
There’s more wrangling with a lock before she can wrest it open, and then “her quick eyes directly fell on a roll of paper pushed back into the further part of the cavity, apparently for concealment, and her feelings at that moment were indescribable.”
Her heart fluttered, her knees trembled, and her cheeks grew pale. She seized, with an unsteady hand, the precious manuscript, for half a glance sufficed to ascertain written characters; and while she acknowledged with awful sensations this striking exemplification of what Henry had foretold, resolved instantly to peruse every line before she attempted to rest.
But wouldn’t you know it, she accidentally snuffs out her candle, and—the fire now gone out as well—is left shuddering in the dark. Also exactly like Henry “foretold.” (Maybe it’s too post-Freudian an interpretation, but I think Catherine’s snuffing of the candle wasn’t an accident, but her subconscious acting to finish the story Henry wouldn’t.)
A violent gust of wind, rising with sudden fury, added fresh horror to the moment. Catherine trembled from head to foot. In the pause which succeeded, a sound like receding footsteps and the closing of a distant door struck on her affrighted ear. Human nature could support no more. A cold sweat stood on her forehead, the manuscript fell from her hand, and groping her way to the bed, she jumped hastily in, and sought some suspension of agony by creeping far underneath the clothes.
Keep in mind, she’s only just arrived at the abbey a few hours earlier, and has already worked herself into this state of frantic derangement. If she sees herself, as she appears to do, as the heroine of a gothic novel, she’d better slow the hell down, or it’s going to be more of a gothic pamphlet.
Fortunately, at this point, there’s not much she cando except tremble under the covers, and wonder what terrible, horrible, awful, dreadful, scandalous, infamous, murderous secret lies revealed on the scrap of paper she’s so diligently sniffed out. Meanwhile, the “very curtains of her bed seemed at one moment in motion, at another the lock of her door was agitated, as if by the attempt of somebody to enter. Hollow murmurs seemed to creep along the gallery, and more than once her blood was chilled by the sound of distant moans.” If there’s a genre cliché Austen has forgotten here, I can’t think of it. (Skeletal faces in the mirror, maybe, but hey, she’s gotta hold something back for night #2.) She’s clearly in roaring good spirits, and is enjoying the hell out of having a heroine—after all those practical, well-grounded, tart-tongued gals—whose essential character trait is impressionability, and whose imagination is unabashedly lurid.
But Catherine’s also a healthy teenager, which means the novelty of screaming night terror lasts only as long as it takes her mind to wander, so that before the storm even ends she’s peacefully sawing logs. And we’re left to wait for the next chapter to hear what’s written on the fateful scrap of paper, and whether it’s written there in ink, blood, or the crude black bile of ancient hellspawn.  (Spoilers: it’s ink.)

Northanger Abbey, chapters 15-18

The morning after the carriage trip to Clifton, which Catherine missed in favor of frolicking in nature with the Tilneys, she gets a note from Isabella “entreating the immediate presence of her friend on a matter of the utmost importance.” We know Isabella well enough to realize that for her “a matter of the utmost importance” could be the purchase of a pair of gloves without which her life has no further meaning, even though she despises finery of all kinds more than the shades of hell. (Yes, I’ve missed her.)
When Catherine arrives there’s a brief moment when she’s alone with Maria Thorpe, who took her place in the Clifton party, and who’s only too happy to relate what a super-sunshiney-funpalooza the whole jaunt was, involving things like stopping to the York Hotel for soup, eating ice at a pastry cook’s—basically the kind of nonstop excitement that might cause a lady to require smelling salts. But there’s one salient detail—or rather lack of one—that stands out for Catherine.
It appeared that Blaize Castle had never been thought of; and, as for all the rest, there was nothing to regret for half an instant. Maria’s intelligence concluded with a tender effusion of pity for her sister Anne, whom she represented as insupportably cross, from being excluded from the party.
“She will never forgive me, I am sure; but, you know, how could I help it? John would have me go, for he vowed he would not drive her, because she had such thick ankles.”
This is so perfect a reason that I require no further explanation.
Isabella now sweeps into the room, possibly to the accompaniment of an orchestral flourish. She banishes Maria like a bad smell, then alights next to Catherine like Glinda alighting next to Dorothy, and says, “Yes, my dear Catherine, it is so indeed; your penetration has not deceived you. Oh! That arch eye of yours! It sees through everything!” Catherine, who has of course seen absolutely nothing, just stares at her slack-jawed; but Isabella is not the kind of woman to allow someone else flubbing her lines to spoil the scene she’s playing.
“Well, and so you guessed it the moment you had my note? Sly creature! Oh! My dear Catherine, you alone, who know my heart, can judge of my present happiness. Your brother is the most charming of men. I only wish I were more worthy of him. But what will your excellent father and mother say? Oh! Heavens! When I think of them I am so agitated!”
Finally the fog around Catherine’s brain begin to dissipate. “Never had [she] listened to anything so full of interest, wonder, and joy. Her brother and best friend engaged!” She bubbles, she fizzes, she effervesces. But in the euphoria sweepstakes, she hasn’t got a chance against her rival player.
“You will be so infinitely dearer to me, my Catherine, than either Anne or Maria: I feel that I shall be so much more attached to my dear Morland’s family than to my own.”
This was a pitch of friendship beyond Catherine.
Austen’s in incredible form here. Recalling the first time she set eyes on James, Isabella says, “I remember I wore my yellow gown, with my hair done up in braids; and when I came into the drawing-room, and John introduced him, I thought I never saw anybody so handsome before.” This kind of ironic projection is hard to pull off, but Austen manages it so deftly we go weak in the knees; and its hilarity is only punctuated by the reception it prompts.
Here Catherine secretly acknowledged the power of love; for, though exceedingly fond of her brother, and partial to all his endowments, she had never in her life thought him handsome.
Isabella babbles on some more about her agonies and ecstasies, before revealing that James will this very morning ride home to Fullerton to obtain blessings from Ma and Pa Morland. How, how, how will Isabella endure the anxiety of waiting for word from him? Catherine assures her no anxiety is called for; her parents are a coupl’a sweethearts who are sure to be all gung-ho for anything that makes their baby boy happy.
“Morland says exactly the same,” replied Isabella; “and yet I dare not expect it; my fortune will be so small; they never can consent to it. Your brother, who might marry anybody!”
Here Catherine again discerned the force of love.
Notice how masterfully Austen has constructed this scene. She’s already shown us Catherine attributing Isabella’s calling James “handsome” to the deranging power of love; so that now, when Isabella makes a similar inference to him being rich, it doesn’t surprise us to see Catherine make the same assumption. Though a few beats later, Isabella says, “As for myself, I am sure I only wish our situations were reversed. Had I the command of millions, were I mistress of the whole world, your brother would be my only choice.” This ought to raise at least a small red flag. But to Catherine, swept up in the novelistic romance of it all, it just gives “a most pleasing remembrance of all the heroines of her acquaintance”. And anyway, it’s hard to get a coherent thought in edgewise with Isabella constantly yammering on.
“For my own part…my wishes are so moderate that the smallest income in nature would be enough for me. Where people are really attached, poverty itself is wealth; grandeur I detest: I would not settle in London for the universe. A cottage in some retired village would be ecstasy.”
Then she declares she mustn’t tempt fate by thinking about these things at all, till she has James’s letter containing his parents’ response. “A reverie succeeded this conviction—and when Isabella spoke again, it was to resolve on the quality of her wedding gown.”
James himself now makes an appearance, popping in to say goodbye before hitting the road to Fullerton. Another wildly funny passage ensues.
Impatient for the realization of all that he hoped at home, his adieus were not long; and they would have been yet shorter, had he not been frequently detained by the urgent entreaties of his fair one that he would go. Twice was he called almost from the door by her eagerness to have him gone. “Indeed, Morland, I must drive you away. Consider how far you have to ride. I cannot bear to see you linger so. For heaven’s sake, waste no more time. There, go, go—I insist on it.”
I don’t know about you, but the first time I read this, I was reduced to making high-pitched, suffering-animal noises. I actually had to put the book down and pull myself together.
Once he’s gone, Isabella’s mother and brother come waltzing in and everyone has a good wallow in what tremendous, really kickass news this is for everybody; and then the younger sisters join them, and since they aren’t yet in on the secret, there’s a lot of smug looks and inscrutable comments meant to keep them in the dark, while at the same time letting them knowthey’re being kept in the dark. Catherine can’t help being a little disturbed by the petty cruelty of this.
…[B]ut Anne and Maria soon set her heart at ease by the sagacity of their “I know what”; and the evening was spent in a sort of war of wit, a display of family ingenuity, on one side in the mystery of an affected secret, on the other of undefined discovery, all equally acute.
Oh, man, I wish Austen had elaborated. I’d have happily read about fifty pages of how that all went down.
A letter from James arrives the next day, bearing the permission of the Morlands, and then everybody comes together again for a big group hug and there are endless bleats and whinnies of happiness and tra-la-la. The only tiiiiny sticking point is that James’s letter contains only the Morlands’ blessings, not any details as to what Morland père will be settling on the young couple. That will have to wait for the nextletter. But Isabella is fine with that. Because, after all, money is absolutely irrelevant to her. She’d be happy to live in a discarded trunk under a bridge, so long as she could share it with sweet perfect incomparable gorgeous booytlicious James. Or so she claims to those around her. Her private thoughts are a little more revealing.
She saw herself at the end of a few weeks, the gaze and admiration of every valued old friend in Putney, with a carriage at her command, a new name on her tickets, and a brilliant exhibition of hooks on her finger.
Meantime, John Thorpe is also leaving Bath. He catches Catherine alone to says his goodbyes, and in the process of reviewing the time they’ve spent together, he mentions the recent engagement news. “A famous good thing this marrying scheme, upon my soul! A clever fancy of Morland’s and Belle’s.” And he asks whether she thinks it’s a good thing, too. She says she does indeed—completely missing the nudge-nudge-wink-wink inherent in his tone. He pounces on her agreement like a panther.
“Do you? That’s honest, by heavens! I am glad you are no enemy to matrimony, however. Did you ever hear the old song ‘Going to One Wedding Brings On Another?’ I say, you will come to Belle’s wedding, I hope.”
“Yes; I have promised your sister to be with her, if possible.”
“And then you know”—twisting himself about and forcing a foolish laugh—“I say, then you know, we may try the truth of this same old song.”
“May we? But I never sing. Well, I wish you a good journey. I dine with Miss Tilney today, and must now be going home.”
But he detains her, and for another full page speaks even more pointedly; I mean, short of thwacking her repeatedly in the face with a bridal bouquet, he couldn’t be more blindingly obvious in his meaning. She, however, remains titanically oblivious throughout, managing to give him replies that mean nothing on their surface, but can be inferred by him to mean she’s ready, willing, and able.
In this way, Austen continues to play a risky game with Catherine. She’s generally presented her as inexperienced and unsophisticated, the kind of girl who’ll accept at face value anything that’s said to her. But there have also been a few incidents, as we’ve seen, in which she’s pricked out somebody’s true meaning all on her own, and without much in the way of clues to work with. Basically, Catherine is naïve or savvy, depending on what a given scene requires her to be. That this doesn’t jar more than it does is a credit to Austen’s gifts; it’s also due to our willingness to keep this baby chugging along, because we’re sure as hell enjoying the ride.
Anyway, Catherine leaves John Thorpe “to the undivided consciousness of his own happy address, and her explicit encouragement”, which is only going to mean trouble later on. Can’t wait! But she’s in for a little immediate turbulence, as she arrives at the Tilneys—still all a-tingle from all the happy happy joy joy at the Thorpes—and finds a bunch of cold fish awaiting her there. Miss Tilney is distant, Henry Tilney says virtually nothing, and “in spite of their father’s great civilities to her—in spite of his thanks, invitations, and compliments—it had been a release to get away from him.” Yeah, there really is something not quite right about the Tilneys, and we don’t know what it is yet. We do know, however, that when it comes to dysfunctional families, we’d rather spend time with rampaging hyena people than inscrutable crocodile types. In other words, more Thorpes, less Tilneys, please.
Isabella is of the same opinion when Catherine tells her about her uncomfortable afternoon with the Tilneys; though she expresses it with her characteristic—and still deeply, cripplingly funny—self-projection. “It was all pride, pride, insufferable haughtiness and pride! She had long suspected the family to be very high, and this made it certain!” And she concludes her tirade by advising Catherine never to think of Henry Tilney again—“indeed he is unworthy of you.”
“Unworthy! I do not suppose he ever thinks of me.”
“That is exactly what I say; he never thinks of you. Such fickleness! Oh! How different to your brother and to mine! I really believe John has the most constant heart.”
This is another of those instances in which Catherine is conveniently more obtuse than any English-speaking human being on the planet would be in a similar situation. Not only does this comment sail right over her head, it does so so completely that it scrapes the underside of the goddamn moon.
Catherine tries to defend the Tilneys, and says she’ll reserve further judgment till she sees them at the rooms later that night. To which comment Isabella is all, oh, you can’t really mean to go dancing tonight? And Catherine says, what, don’t you? Isabella immediately buckles.
“Nay, since you make such a point of it, I can refuse you nothing. But do not insist upon my being very agreeable. For my heart, you know, will be some forty miles off. And as for dancing, do not mention it, I beg; that is quite out of the question. Charles Hodges will plague me to death, I dare say: but I shall cut him very short. Ten to one but he guesses the reason, and that is exactly what I want to avoid, so I shall insist on his keeping his conjecture to himself.”
Love, love, love Isabella. She not only fully intends to flirt, she’s actually flat-out rehearsing for it.
Evening comes, Catherine meets the Tilneys at the rooms, and whaddaya know, it’s like nothing weird ever happened: they’re their usual charming, attentive, super-perfect selves. “Miss Tilney took pains to be near her, and Henry asked her to dance.” So Catherine can gratefully dismiss the whole jagged afternoon visit as a mere blip.
The Tilneys are also accompanied by their newly arrived brother, Captain Tilney. Catherine “looked at him with great admiration, and even supposed it possible that some other people might think him handsomer than his brother, though in her eyes, his air was more assuming, and his countenance less prepossessing.” And that ain’t all he’s got working against him. He makes it very clear he scorns the whole idea of dancing, and mocks Henry for even “finding it possible.” Austen gathers up all this opprobrium and runs with it.
From the latter circumstance it may be presumed that, whatever might be our heroine’s opinion of him, his admiration of her was not of a very dangerous kind; not likely to produce animosities between the brothers, nor persecutions to the lady. He cannot be the instigator of the three villains in horsemen’s greatcoats, by whom she will hereafter be forced into a travelling-chaise and four, which will drive off with incredible speed.
(This is one of those passages that’s even funnier if you’re still picturing Catherine played by Terry Jones.)
So yes, Catherine is safe and happy with Henry, “listening with sparkling eyes to everything he said; and, in finding him irresistible, becoming so herself.” This is possibly the harshest, most nakedly unsentimental summation of relations between the sexes that Austen ever dashed off—and that’s saying something. It stopped me in my tracks. It’s the basis for everything I dislike about Henry Tilney…and, paradoxically, everything I love about Jane Austen.
Despite the captain’s loudly stated disdain for dancing, he ends up—after a heated confab with his brother—asking Catherine (through Henry) whether Isabella might be interested in throwing down some righteous moves. Catherine assures him that Isabella would rather be torn apart by lions than dance; and feels briefly sorry for Captain Tilney in being rejected, until she concludes he probably only asked because he saw Isabella sitting out, and pitied her. Henry Tilney thinks this is just adorbs.
“With you, it is not, How is such a one likely to be influenced, What is the inducement most likely to act upon such a person’s feelings, age, situation, and probably habits of life considered—but, How should I be influenced, What would be myinducement in acting so and so?”
“I do not understand you.”
“Then we are on very unequal terms, for I understand you perfectly well.”
“Me? Yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”
“Bravo! An excellent satire on modern language.”
Eventually, after teasing her some more, he tells her what he means: that her chalking up Captain Tilney’s wish to dance with Isabella “to good nature alone convinced me of your being superior in good nature yourself to all the rest of the world.”
I point out this passage because it’s one of the few times we actually see Tilney viewing Catherine as an actual human being separate from himself, rather than as a reasonably attractive sounding board for all his quips and zingers.
Catherine blushes at his compliment, but she doesn’t have long to enjoy it, because something astonishing catches her eye—by which I mean, astonishing to her, not to us. We, to the contrary, have been counting the seconds waiting for it—and here it is: Captain Tilney leading Isabella to the dance floor.
Catherine’s well and truly gobsmacked. She can’t understand how this could happen, when Isabella was so determined not to dance. “And did Isabella never change her mind before?” Mr. Tilney asks her. But-but-but, she replies, how could your brother even dare ask her, after what he’d been told? Captain Tilney’s conduct, Henry informs her, “has been no more than I believed him perfectly equal to.” And then he does something surprising: he sticks up for Isabella.
“To be always firm must be to be often obstinate. When properly to relax is the trial of judgment; and, without reference to my brother, I really think Miss Thorpe has by no means chosen ill in fixing on the present hour.”
Miss Thorpe herself, however, disagrees. When she finally gets free and is able to explain herself to Catherine, it’s all about how Captain Tilney harangued her until she gave in, how it gave her no pleasure, how his compliments and attentions oppressed her, how dancing with him was the greatest trial in the world. In other words, her usual bravura bullshit.
“I am so glad it is over! My spirits are quite jaded with listening to his nonsense: and then, being such a smart young fellow, I saw every eye was upon us.”
“He is very handsome indeed.”
“Handsome! Yes, I suppose he may. I dare say people would admire him in general; but he is not at all in my style of beauty. I hate a florid complexion and dark eyes in a man. However, he is very well. Amazingly conceited, I am sure. I took him down several times, in my way.”
Isabella’s about to be taken down herself. A letter from James arrives the next day, with the news that his father is giving him a living in his patronage worth four hundred pounds a year, as soon as he’s old enough to take it—which means a delay of at least two years before he and Isabella can marry. Catherine, who sees this for what it is—a very generous settlement from a man with ten children—congratulates the bride-to-be. Tellingly, Isabella thanks her “with a grave face.” I’m picturing your basic kabuki death scowl, here.
So yeah, she’s not tickled pink. And when her mother—whose defect, we’ve come to learn over these recent chapters, is to see her children as exactly the opposite of what they really are—chimes in with her congratulations, the façade starts to chip a bit.
“Four hundred is but a small income to begin on indeed, but your wishes, my dear Isabella, are so moderate, you do not consider how little you ever want, my dear.”
“It is not on my own account I wish for more; but I cannot bear to be the means of injuring my dear Morland, making him sit down upon an income hardly enough to find one in the common necessaries of life. For myself, it is nothing; I never think of myself.”
It’s when she starts to grouse in a roundabout way that maybe Mr. Morland wasn’t quite as free with his purse strings as he could’ve been that Catherine, distressed, comes to his defense, saying she’s certain “my father has promised to do as much as he can afford.” Realizing she’s strayed a bit too close to unflattering self-exposure, Isabella does some amazingly swift backpedaling, claiming it’s really the long wait before marrying that’s made her unhappy. Mrs. Thorpe chimes in, with some really stratospheric cluelessness that gives you a pretty good idea about how her daughter ended up the way she did.
“Yes, yes, my darling Isabella,” said Mrs. Thorpe, “we perfectly see into your heart. You have no disguise. We perfectly understand the present vexation; and everybody must love you the better for such a noble honest affection.”
You suddenly get a picture of Isabella at age five or six, on a screaming tear around a church or park or some other public place, while her mother looks fondly on and coos,  “The dear child—so filled with high spirits! What good it does one to witness such bounding enthusiasm.” (And man, have we not allwanted to pistol whip mothers like this? I wonder if they were as common in Austen’s time as they are in ours.)
As for Catherine…well, she may have been too dense to pick up on John Thorpe’s heavily dropped hints (which is saying something; the thud they made on landing was probably heard across the channel), but she’s clearly been infected by “Going to One Wedding Brings On Another.”
Once or twice indeed, since James’s engagement had taught her what could be done, she had got so far as to indulge in a secret “perhaps,” but in general the felicity of being with [Henry Tilney] for the present bounded her views; the present was now comprised in another three weeks [in Bath], and her happiness being certain for that period, the rest of her life was at such a distance as to excite but little interest.
Unfortunately for her, the Allens’ prolonged stay in town doesn’t coincide with the Tilneys’ own plans: Catherine learns they’ll be leaving at the end of another week. Miss Tilney sighs that her father “can seldom be prevailed on to give the waters what I think a fair trial”, which is hard for us to judge because we’re never told what’s the matter with him. (Probably one of those Regency complaints, like “phlegmatic” or “choleric,” that don’t translate to our more clinical modern age, when we’re all ready with precise self-diagnoses like, “My serotonin levels are dipping.”) But all may not be lost; Miss Tilney starts to hem and haw a bit, in that wonderfully English manner that so delights us when we’re in line behind someone who’s taking twenty-five minutes to buy a British Rail pass. “Perhaps,” she says, “…you would be so good—it would make me very happy if—”
Fortunately General Tilney barges in and interrupts the endless preamble by asking his daughter whether she’s got around to asking Catherine to come and stay with them yet.
That’s right: Catherine is invited to join the family on their return to the Tilney ancestral home in Gloucestershire. If there were any hesitation in her mind (which there most certainly isn’t), the General squashes it dead with one muttered apologia.
“ ’Tis true, we can offer you nothing like the gaieties of this lively place; we can tempt you neither by amusement nor splendour, for our mode of living, as you see, is plain and unpretending; yet no endeavours shall be wanting on our side to make Northanger Abbey not wholly disagreeable.”
Northanger Abbey! These were thrilling words, and wound up Catherine’s feelings to the highest point of ecstasy.
So we’re on page one-hundred-and-bloody-twelve, and finally the name of the book makes sense. Though the titular pile of bricks is going to have to be a seriously imposing thing if it’s going to be worthy of this kind of build-up.
I’m actually of two minds about the book’s title. Austen herself simply called it Catherine, which was very much her way—and very likely no more than the market required. Still you have to wonder that someone so inventive, should be so offhand in the christening of her works. And you have to wonder, as well, what she would’ve thought of the title it was eventually slapped with, after her death—and that has come down to us by way of the centuries. If she was at all like the authors of today, her reaction might well be in the range encompassed at one end by appalled embarrassment, at the other homicidal fury.
Still, Northanger Abbey is the title we’ve got. And as I said, I’m of two minds about it. I’ll explain my other, more approving thoughts when the time comes.
In the meantime, Catherine’s pretty much in delirium overdrive—not only at getting a chance to hang tight with Henry under his own roof, but at having that roof be perched atop an actual goddamn abbey. Her mind boggles at the possibilities. “[Northanger’s] long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined chapel, were to be within her daily reach, and she could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun.” She can’t imagine how Henry and Miss Tilney—novel readers both—can be so blasé about living in such a sinister Disneyland. She concludes they’ve just grown accustomed to it. “Their superiority of abode was no more to them than their superiority of person.” Personally, I think the Tilneys behave more or less exactly like they grew up in a dank, airless vault.
This squirming-in-her-seat anticipation of reenacting Scooby Doo episodes at Northanger Abbey proves so distracting to Catherine, that it’s a few days before she realizes she’s scarcely seen Isabella at all. And when the two friends do meet again, at the pump-room, Isabella squirrels her away to a private corner of the room, her “favourite place”, she says, for a “secret conference”. This favourite place, Catherine soon notes, is perfectly situated so that they can keep tabs on both entrances to the room, and “Isabella’s eyes were continually bent towards one door or the other, as in eager expectation”—for James, Catherine assumes; who, she reassures her, will very soon be here.
“Psha! My dear creature,” she replied, “do not think me such a simpleton as to be always wanting to confine him to my elbow. It would be hideous to be always together; we should be the jest of the place.”
And that’s all the energy she can spare for discussing her fiancé. So right away, we know something’s up. (And of course, being experienced novel-readers ourselves, we know what.) Instead, she gets right down to business: she’s had a letter from her brother John, and slyly tells Catherine “you may guess the contents.” Catherine, being Catherine, can do no such thing; this is a girl who couldn’t guess the contents of a hard-boiled egg. So Isabella is forced to come out and tell her: “What can he write about, but yourself? You know he is over head and ears in love with you.”
The expected disputation follows; Catherine says she had no idea, Isabella says but you gave him encouragement, Catherine says the hell I did, Isabella says but he made you an offer and you gave him reason to hope, Catherine says no he didn’t and no I’d didn’t…and so on. Eventually Catherine puts the whole thing definitively to bed by saying, “I would not speak disrespectfully of a brother of yours, Isabella, I am sure; but you know very well that if I could think of one man more than another—he is not the person.” A few beats later she adds, “And, you know, we shall still be sisters.”
Isabella’s response?...A very cagey, “Yes, yes…there are more ways than one of our being sisters.”
As usual, that catapults right over Catherine’s concrete-thick cranium. But she begins to get a glimmer of something new being stirred into the mix when Isabella—instead of berating her for refusing her brother John—surprises her (and even us, a bit) by taking her side, excusing her relations with John as a “little harmless flirtation” and that “one is often drawn on to give more encouragement than one wishes to stand by. But you may be assured that I am the last person in the world to judge you severely.” And then, even more tellingly: “What one means one day, you know, one may not mean the next. Circumstances change, opinions alter.”
Here Austen’s genius shines through yet again. Up to now, Isabella’s habit of revealing her own thoughts and character by imposing them on others—what I call ironic projection—has simply been a source of high comedy. But we now see that it’s all been in the service of a higher purpose; Austen, the most economical of great writers, never wastes a syllable. So that when Isabella here begins to talk about Catherine and her choices, we’re conditioned to read between the lines, and infer exactly what Austen wishes us to infer.
“My dearest Catherine…I would not for all the world be the means of hurrying you into an engagement before you knew what you were about. I do not think anything would justify me in wishing you to sacrifice all your happiness merely to oblige my brother, because he is my brother, and who perhaps after all, you know, might be just as happy without you, for people seldom know what they would be at, young men especially, they are so amazingly changeable and inconstant. What I say is, why should a brother’s happiness be dearer to me than a friend’s? You know I carry my notions of friendship pretty high. But, above all things, my dear Catherine, do not be in a hurry. Take my word for it, that if you are in too great a hurry, you will certainly live to repent it. Tilney says there is nothing people are so often deceived in as the state of their own affections, and I believe he is very right. Ah! Here he comes; never mind, he will not see us, I am sure.”
Well, of course he’s going to see them. The whole pointis that he see them. And if by some chance he couldn’t see them, he could sniff the goddamn pheromones she’s giving off. He could find her blindfolded.
But Isabella, being Isabella, has to pretend that what she wants most is what she doesn’t want at all, so when Captain Tilney in fact turns and sees her eye piercing his, and trots over and plumps down next to her, she pretends it’s a horrid inconvenience. “What!” he murmurs. “Always to be watched, in person or by proxy!” (I think this “proxy” refers to Catherine, who was of course also looking at him.)
“Phsa, nonsense!” was Isabella answer to the same half whisper. “Why do you put such things in my head? If I could believe it—my spirit, you know, is pretty independent.”
“I wish your heart were independent. That would be enough for me.”
“My heart, indeed! What can you have to do with hearts? You men have none of you any hearts.”
So yeah, the volley of flirting is pretty much Wimbeldon-level right from the get-go. And it only picks up steam from here. The only way they could be more obvious is by physically hissing and scratching at each other like a pair of mating cats on a rooftop.
And Catherine…Catherine half gets it. Slammed full in the face with teasing, pouting, pleading, and innuendo, she realizes there are some serious sexual undercurrents here. But…she thinks it’s all on the captain’s side. Remarkably, given all the weeks she’s known Isabella, she still thinks her too guileless and innocent to understand what’s taking place. When of course she’s the one behind the wheel of this eighteen-wheeler, and it’s going exactly where she’s steering it.
How strange that [Isabella] should not perceive his admiration! Catherine longed to give her a hint of it, to put her on her guard, and prevent all the pain which her too lively behaviour might otherwise create for both him and her brother.
But she doesn’t. She can’t. That would mean taking Isabella aside for a moment, and Isabella is oh so very not going anywhere. If Captain Tilney sits here in the pump-room till the sun goes nova and the stars blink out, she’ll sit here too—all the while protesting that she really must be off, she has much better things to do than waste her time on such an impertinent rake.
Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for an astronomical event of quite that magnitude; some far more localized explosions will be coming along to keep us alert and interested…and maybe even shake Catherine into an awareness of what her two eyes are actually seeing and sending to her brain.
Don’t place any bets on it, though.

Northanger Abbey, chapters 12-14

When we last left Catherine, she was suffering a real fit of anxiety. She was certain Mr. and Miss Tilney believed she deliberately blew off their planned country walk to go careening about in John Thorpe’s carriage. We join her now, making her way to the Tilneys’ house “with eager steps and a beating heart to pay her visit, explain her conduct, and be forgiven;” but Austen isn’t going to make it that easy for her. When does she ever? The best fiction—the best of any kind of experience, really—is all a matter of tension and release, and Austen masterfully provides us here with whitecap-level waves of tension before she’ll even consider letting them crest and break.
Catherine presents herself at the front door and asks to see Miss Tilney. “The man”—so Austen calls him (her servants are rarely given names; this one isn’t even provided a function)—says he believes his mistress is at home, but isn’t certain. “Would she be pleased to send up her name?” Would she ever! She’d agree to send up a blood sample if it meant gaining admittance to this pile of bricks.
The man returns a few minutes later and is all whoops, my bad, Miss Tilney isn’t in after all. Catherine is aghast. “She felt almost persuaded that Miss Tilney was at home, and too much offended to admit her”. And in fact, as she’s sadly slogging away in retreat, she tosses a backward glance at the house, and whaddaya know— there’s Miss Tilney and her father just coming out the front door. She watches with her jaw on her chest as they descend the front steps and then set off in the opposite direction.
Of course Catherine is mortified; but she’s too humble to be angry. Not humble in the maddeningly inert Fanny Price manner; she simply “knew not how such an offence as hers might be classed by the laws of worldly politeness, to what a degree of unforgiveness it might with propriety lead, nor to what rigours of rudeness in return it might justly make her amenable.” In other words, she’s giving the Tilneys the benefit of the doubt. Which is why we ultimately like her, even though she can be such a prize dork.
She has another moment that’s Fanny-like, where she considers allowing her dejection and mortification to keep her home from the theatre that night; but it’s only a moment. Then she realizes, first, that she doesn’t have any excuse for staying home, and second—hey, she really wants to see the play. It’s, like, a comedy and everything. Oh yeah, we like this kid.
She’s also kinda sorta hoping she’ll see the Tilneys there—and in fact they do show up, but very late. When she sees them, Catherine’s enjoyment of the play, which so far she’s found to be a real knee-slapper, comes to a dead halt. All she can now do is try to catch Tilney’s eye. And when she finally succeeds, he gives her a brief, chilly bow, then turns his attention back to the stage. Whoa. The poor girl has to take a moment to rub her nose and cheeks to forestall frostbite.
Catherine was restlessly miserable; she could almost have run around to the box in which he sat and forced him to hear her explanation. Feelings rather natural than heroic possessed her; instead of considering her own dignity injured by this ready condemnation—instead of proudly resolving, in conscious innocence, to show her resentment towards him who could harbour a doubt of it, to leave to him all the trouble of seeking an explanation, and to enlighten him on the past only by avoiding his sight, or flirting with somebody else—she took to herself all the shame of misconduct, or at least of its appearance, and was only eager for an opportunity of explanation.
That right there—that paragraph—that’s the kind of thing that separates Jane Austen from her inferiors, as well as from her innumerable coattail-hangers—those polite lady novelists who churn out “sequels” with titles like Lace Doilies at Hartfield and Darcy In Jeopardy. Austen’s fiction thrums with the inner lives of her characters—messy, urgent, hurting. Catherine—ping-ponging between resolve and self-doubt, suppressing anger and wallowing in regret, and yet making us laugh all the while (“she could almost have run around to the box in which he sat and forced him to hear her”)—is here, briefly, magnificent. She’s flesh and blood. She’s us.
And so she is again when Tilney finally—observing the proper forms—comes around after the curtain to pay his respects. Once he’s addressed the elder ladies and turned to Catherine, she blurts out all her anxieties in one big girlish gush.
“Oh! Mr. Tilney, I have been quite wild to speak to you, and make my apologies. You must have thought me so rude; but indeed it was not my fault, was it, Mrs. Allen? Did not they tell me that Mr. Tilney and his sister were gone out in a phaeton together? And then what could I do? But I had ten thousand times rather have been with you; now had not I, Mrs. Allen?”
“My dear, you tumble my gown,” was Mrs. Allen’s reply.
When Catherine finally winds down, Austen challenges us with the question, “Is there a Henry in the world who could be insensible to such a declaration? Henry Tilney at least was not.” Well, okay. Granted. But there’s something reptilian about the way he lets Catherine back into his good graces. Until she’s delivered her whole spiel, it seems fifty-fifty whether he’s going to just snap her up and eat her whole. But then she abases herself sufficiently to satisfy him. I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: Henry Tilney’s attraction to Catherine seems almost entirely based on how successfully he can manipulate her. He seems to exult in his power to make her blush, laugh, even panic. There’s nothing inherent in her—nothing about her character, her looks, her history—that exerts any sort of pull on him; only how well she jerks when he pulls her strings.
He does, however, put her mind at ease about the incident earlier in the day, of which his sister has told him. Apparently when Catherine called at the front door, the man gave her name, not to Miss Tilney, but to the general, who was waiting for his daughter to come downstairs and go out with him, and who wasn’t in the mood for any further delays; so it was his decision to tell Catherine that Miss Tilney was out—not Miss Tilney’s herself. In fact, Miss Tilney has been “very much vexed, and meant to make her apology as soon as possible.” No word on whether the general is feeling similarly contrite. My own take is, if Catherine hadn’t beaten a sufficiently hasty retreat from his front door, he’d have pulled a musket from the wall and given her a bustle full of buckshot.
But maybe I’m being hasty. While Catherine and Mr. Tilney talk, she notices that—what the bloody hell—John Thorpe is now in the Tilneys’ box, and is chatting up the general himself. Even worse, “she felt something more than surprise when she thought she could perceive herself the subject of their attention and discourse.” Which makes no sense at all, given that one doesn’t know her at all, and the other knows her only as a good listener. They’d have more common ground for conversation talking about weather trends on Jupiter.
When John comes back to squire the ladies out of the theater, Catherine comes right out and asks him whether he knows General Tilney. “Know him! There are few people much about town that I do not know.” Oh, man, this guy! He just never disappoints. Anyway, it turns out he and the General belong to the same club, and are both regulars in its billiard room.
“One of the best players we have, by the by; and we had a little touch together, though I was almost afraid of him at first: the odds were five to one against me; and, if I had not made one of the cleanest strokes that perhaps ever was made in the world—I took his ball exactly—but I could not make you understand it without a table: however, I did beat him. A very fine fellow; as rich as a Jew. I should like to dine with him; I dare say he gives famous dinners. But what do you think we have been talking of? You. Yes, by heaven. And the general thinks you the finest girl in Bath…And what do you think I said?...—well done, general, said I; I am quite of your mind.”
It’s no secret that I love John Thorpe; he’s so energetically shameless. I can’t help ranking him one of Austen’s very finest comic creations, right up there with Mr. Collins, Aunt Norris, and Mrs. Bates. But I also have to wonder where he came from; the obvious answer would be, from Austen’s exposure to similarly pompous braggarts among her own acquaintance. But there’s something about him that’s almost Falstaffian—a kind of brio that transcends mere English gaucherie. In fact he reminds me of Benvenuto Cellini, the Renaissance goldsmith whose titanically self-serving autobiography is one of the most entertaining literary works to survive from that period. Imagine John Thorpe as an Italian, roaming Europe and encountering kings, dukes, popes, and emperors and easily getting the better of all of them, leaving women weeping when he abandons them and enemies dead when he crosses them. And then bragging about it with unflagging verve. There was an English translation of his autobiography published in 1777, so it’s possible Austen could have read it…though it’s pretty salty stuff for the spinster daughter of an Anglican rector. But this is my little pet conceit and I refuse to give it up.
Anyway, Catherine’s now on cloud nine, having entered the theater convinced that all three Tilneys despised her, and now leaving—what a dramatic change!—knowing the exact opposite. She can barely contain herself. She may just cartwheel all the way back to Pulteney Street; Austen doesn’t say.
A week passes, and the Thorpe siblings decide to resurrect the scheme of the carriage ride to Clifton—probably with lots of gasps and bellows and shrieks of delight and choruses of damned fine idea, that, before they finally seal the deal. All that remains is to inform the Morland siblings, and it’s a go—for the very next day, in fact.
Unfortunately, at exactly this time Catherine is accepting Miss Tilney’s invitation to reschedule that other thwarted outing—the country walk—for the next day as well. So that when she returns to the Allens’ house and finds John and James and Isabella there, waiting to pounce—“as soon as she came again, her agreement was demanded”—she has to turn disappoint them. She has a prior commitment.
This segues into two and half pages of everybody just going nuclear on her. It reminds me of the scene in Mansfield Parkin which Fanny Price refuses to act, and the entire household tries to persuade, cajole, wheedle, even shame her into relenting. The difference is, there are no agonies involved for Catherine, as there were for Fanny; she’d rather spend a morning walking with the Tilneys than an entire day being shouted at by John Thorpe, so she will—not—budge. She easily withstands blandishments from John, entreaties from James, and tears from Isabella (who basically accuses her of liking Miss Tilney more than her—uh, sweetheart, I wouldn’t force the issue on that one, if I were you). Catherine is a goddamn rock.
Even better, she gives as good as she gets. When they suggest to her that the Tilneys could just as easily move the country-walk to Tuesday, Catherine shoots back that they could just as easily move the drive to Tuesday. (But oh no, John Thorpe suddenly remembers that he maybe possibly yes in fact must be away on Tuesday.) Then when Catherine says, just go without me, Isabella suddenly turns all Catholic school girl (“I cannot be the only woman. I would not, upon any account in the world, do so improper a thing”), Catherine volleys back, then invite one of your other sisters. But John ain’t havin’ that.
“Thank ye,” cried Thorpe, “but I did not come to Bath to drive my sisters about, and look like a fool. No, if you not go, d— me if I do. I only go for the sake of driving you.”
“That is a compliment which gives me no pleasure.” But her words were lost on Thorpe, who had turned abruptly away.
John storms off, the flow of argument comes to an abrupt halt, and Catherine, Isabella, and James are left to make their way around the room together in an awkward, frustrated silence—Catherine’s “arm still within Isabella’s though their hearts were at war. At one moment she was softened, at another irritated; always distressed, but always steady.”
“I did not think you had been so obstinate, Catherine,” said James: “you were not used to be so hard to persuade; you once were the kindest, best-tempered of my sisters.”
“I hope I am less so now,” she replied, very feelingly; “but indeed I cannot go. If I am wrong, I am doing what I believe to be right.”
“I suspect,” said Isabella, in a low voice, “there is no great struggle.”
Catherine’s heart swelled; she drew away her arm, and Isabella made no opposition.
In an Austen novel, this is the equivalent of a seven-minute ninja fight scene.
Meantime, we think John’s just gone off to sulk; but he now returns to the others to reveal he’s been on a mission. “Well, I have settled the matter,” he says brightly, “and now we may all go tomorrow with a safe conscience. I have been to Miss Tilney, and made your excuses.” Catherine, of course, is all nuh-uh you diuhn’t, and he’s all nuh-huh I diuhd.
“I have, upon my soul. Left her this moment. Told her you had sent me to say that, having just recollected a prior engagement of going to Clifton with us tomorrow, you could not have the pleasure of walking with her till Tuesday. She said very well, Tuesday was just as convenient to her; so there is an end to all our difficulties A pretty good thought of mine—hey?”
Everyone is all bravo, well done, except for Catherine, who is busy suppressing her inner homicidal maniac. We don’t know what’s more appalling to her, that James bloody Thorpe took the liberty of speaking for her—or that the Tilneys now believe she chose James Bloody Thorpe to speak for her. In any case, she turns to run after the Tilneys to put them straight…
…and John and Isabella stop her. I mean, physically. “Isabella…caught hold of one hand, Thorpe of the other, and remonstrances poured in from all three.” They actually hold her back, while her brother looks on approvingly. It’s one of the most shocking scenes in the entire Austen canon—this is emphatically not a world in which people go around laying hands on each other with coercion in mind—but, like some of her earlier erotic scenes, she treads lightly over it, and soon it’s gone. She’s like that, our gal J.A.; she doesn’t linger over her highly-charged moments, and she doesn’t indulge them either. There’s never anything about her that’s overwrought or manipulative. Maybe that’s why, even after Catherine’s broken away from the Thorpe siblings’ grip and bolted, our hearts continue pounding for several paragraphs.
Of course I’m compelled to point out that John and Isabella physically restraining Catherine is an illustration of their function in the novel, which is to impede Catherine, block her way, hold her back; but as readers, at this point, we’re less impressed by the skilled use of metaphor than we are immersed in the immediacy of the action. In fact, at this point, metaphor can go take a hike. Or a carriage ride to Clifton, either one.
John tells Catherine it’s useless to attempt to talk to the Tilneys, as they were on their way out the door when he caught them and are probably already home by now. But Catherine doesn’t care; she wrests herself away from him and dashes all the way across town to catch up with them, her heart all twisted up with regret and frustration—even about the trio of cads she’s just left behind.
In was painful to her to disappoint and displease them, particularly displease her brother; but she could not repent her resistance. Setting her own inclination apart, to have failed a second time in her engagement to Miss Tilney, to have retracted a promise voluntarily made only five minutes before, and on a false pretence too, must have been wrong. She had not been withstanding them on selfish principles alone, she had not consulted merely her own gratification; that might have been ensured in some degree by the excursion itself, by seeing Blaize Castle; no, she had attended to what was due to others, and to her own character in their opinion.
So, yeah, she’s a bit of a geek, admittedly; but dang if the girl doesn’t have some supersize cojones.
And while this scene, too, conjures up some comparisons to Fanny Price and her adamant refusal to submit, it also draws up the dramatic differences in Catherine Morland. The single at of runningthrough Bath to catch up with the Tilneys and put things right—possibly whipping up the local stray dogs and turning them into a marauding pack for several blocks—shows more initiative, energy, and righteous verve than Fanny Price—that pillar of passivity, that stalwart of stillness—showed through the entirety of Mansfield Park.
In fact Catherine’s run so hard and so fast, that reaches the Tilneys’ house just as they’re entering it; and Catherine, with more concern for clearing her name than for the laws of propriety, pretty much knocks aside “the man” to get past him. She then flings herself into the house—
—and finds herself in the drawing room with all the Tilneys assembled—Mr., Miss, and General—all undoubtedly regarding this wild-eyed, gasping trespasser with the thought (and who could blame them) that she’s come to stab them all to death and then gnaw on their bloodied bones.
But then she launches into her typically lurching, rat-a-tat, girl-dork explanation: “I am come in a great hurry—It was all a mistake—I never promised to go—I told them from the first I could not go.—I ran away in a great hurry to explain it.—I did not care what you thought of me.—I would not stay for the servant.”
After a performance like that, who knows what the Tilneys expect next from her. Possibly that she’ll faint, or drop down on all fours and start pulling stuffing from the ottoman with her teeth. But good manners carry the day, and soon everyone is back in perfect accord, and Catherine is belatedly introduced to the general, “and received by him with such ready, such solicitous politeness as recalled Thorpe’s information to her mind, and made her think with pleasure that he might be sometimes depended on.” See, that’s another difference between Catherine and Fanny; Fanny would shrink at being introduced to someone who she knew to be her admirer; Catherine totally grooves on it. If she had a smartphone, she’d whip it out, put her arm around General Tilney’s neck, and snap a selfie.
Catherine hangs out with the clan for a quarter-hour, and when she gets up to go the general is so charmed he invites her to spend the rest of the day with his daughter (purely for her sake, of course: nothing to do with the general himself getting to scope out her superfine bootah for a few hours more). Alas, the Allens are expecting her back; but the invitation is offered for another day, and the general even walks Catherine to the door with his own actual human feet, “saying everything gallant as they went downstairs, admiring the elasticity of her walk, which corresponded exactly with the spirit of her dancing,” which apparently he’d been studying from afar—the old spotted dog.
Catherine is so over the moon that she proceeds “gaily to Pulteney Street, walking, as she concluded, with great elasticity, though she had never thought of it before.” (I admit it; I barked a laugh.) But once she gets home, she’s overcome by a sudden ethical soupiness; maybe, she now wonders, she was over-hasty in turning down the outing to Clifton, especially since it really could have been managed with just a word or two to Miss Tilney about rescheduling the walk.
A sacrifice was always noble, and if she had given way to their entreaties, she should have been spared the distressing idea of a friend displeased, a brother angry, and a scheme of happiness to both destroyed, perhaps through her means.
Yeah, we’ve all been here—we get what we want, after making a big fuss about it…and then, instead of being satisfied with winning, we’re embarrassed by the fuss we’ve made. To ease her mind, she decides “to ascertain by the opinion of an unprejudiced person what her own conduct had really been,” and so asks Mrs. Allen for his two cents. He ends up giving her a whole two bits.
“These schemes are not at all the thing. Young men and women driving about the country in open carriages! Now and then it is very well; but going to inns and public places together! It is not right; and I wonder Mrs. Thorpe should allow it. I am glad you do not think of going; I am sure Mrs. Morland would not be pleased. Mrs. Allen, are not you of my way of thinking? Do not you find these kind of projects objectionable?”
“Yes, very much so indeed. Open carriages are nasty things. A clean gown is not five minutes’ wear in them. You are splashed getting in and getting out; and the wind takes your hair and your bonnet in every direction. I hate an open carriage myself.”
Mrs. Allen doesn’t exactly have a catchphrase, but she might as well. She’s only got one joke. Luckily, it’s a really, really funny one, and gives us a good howl every time she trots it out…which she does once or twice more, before the scene ends.
Catherine is inexpressibly relieved, because the Allens’ disapproval of carriage rides gives her an unarguable excuse to decline all further invitations from John and Isabella. But…Mr. Allen’s view of the whole tawdry activity is so extreme that Catherine wonders whether Isabella even knows how indecorously she’s behaving. Maybe she ought to write to her, and tell her so…? Mr. Allen, proving he’s more a man of the world than we’d have thought, gently dissuades her. After all, she has “a mother to advise her…Mrs. Thorpe is too indulgent beyond a doubt; but however, you had better not interfere. She and your brother choose to go, and you will be getting only ill will.” Which is exactly on point. Props to Mr. A. He oughtta leave the gaming tables and come play with the others more often.
The next morning, the Tilneys call at the appointed time and, “no new difficulty arising, no sudden recollection, no unexpected summons, no impertinent intrusion to disconcert their measures, my heroine was most unnaturally able to fulfill her engagement, thought it was made with the hero himself.” Oh, J.A., you utter card.
They set off on their outing, and, these being Jane Austen characters, are allowed about nineteen syllables to exclaim over the beauty of nature before they get down to business. Catherine compares the vista to the south of France, which prompts Mr. Tilney to ask whether she’s journeyed abroad. She hasn’t, of course; but she feels like an authority on that particular region because “Emily and her father travelled through [it], in The Mysteries of Udolpho.” She then blushes and apologizes for herself, because of course Mr. Tilney wouldn’t be familiar with something so silly as novel. Novels “are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books.” Mr. Tilney immediately sets her straight on that score.
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.”
Of course this doesn’t surprise us by now. What would astonish us, is to see Mr. Tilney engage in some actively masculine pursuit—joining Mr. Allen at the whist table, for instance, or making wagers on a bear-baiting. But he’s far more likely to cozy up with the gals for an afternoon of tittle-tattle and petit-point. He keeps coming out with things you can’t imagine issuing from the lips of any prior Austen hero—like, “I myself have read hundreds and hundreds [of novels]. Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas.” If Colonel Brandon ever said anything like that, Mrs. Jennings would insist he go to bed, and would sit by him with cold compresses and nurse him back to his senses.
Tilney goes on to berate Catherine (teasingly, of course) for saying that Udolphois “the nicest book in the world.” Apparently he’s one of those delightful sticklers for syntax we all enjoy getting stuck with for an afternoon, or an eon (which amount to the same thing, when they’re around). Invoking the archaic definition of the word (out of fashion even then), he says, “The nicest—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend on the binding.” Sweet lawd baby jebus.
This prompts his sister to scold him—something we didn’t know she had it in her to do; it makes us actually like her more (actually, it makes us regard her for the first time as anything beyond a name and a dress). “Miss Morland,” she tells Catherine, “he is treating you exactly as he treats his sister…The word ‘nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him”.
“I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?”
“Very true,” said Henry, “and this is a very nice day, and we are having a very nice walk, and you two are very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything.”
He goes on in this vein, with his sister taking an occasional kittenish swipe at him, which he appears to accept good-naturedly enough…and I have to wonder again why, why, why I just do notlike Henry Tilney. I’m reminded of what I said about Lydia Bennet when I was discussing Pride and Prejudice: that in another novel—by another writer—I’d probably love her to smithereens; but in P&P I can’t stand her. The same applies to Tilney: a fey, foppish clotheshorse, who talks of nothing but himself and spews forth epigrams like grapeshot? Sign me up, baby! My kinda popinjay!...And yet here, in Northanger Abbey, I find his presence grating.
The best explanation I can arrive at, is that it’s a matter of style. Tilney (like Lydia) is self-centered; the pleasure he take in himself is really all that matters. (Is there any doubt that, of the three in this chapter who are treated to his maxims and bon mots, he himself is the most impressed by them?) He’s flamboyant, expansive, and extrovert. He is, in other words, a proto-Victorian. Wait thirty years and there’ll be dudes like this running all over Albion (and through the pages of its literature). 
But Austen’s world is more crystalline; its textures are clean rather than velvet, its tone astringent rather than voluble, its primary visual component light, not color. Characters like Mr. Tilney come into that, and they muddy it up. After every Tilney chapter, I feel like I need a shower.
Anyway…the literary talk turns from fiction to history, and for a while the conversation percolates. Catherine doesn’t like the genre (“The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page, the men all good for nothing, and hardly any women at all”); Miss Tilney—predictably—is a fan, and makes a spirited case for it. That someone as super-awesome as Miss Tilney actually enjoys history comes as a relief to Catherine, who up to now has felt sorry for historians, believing that they labored “only for the torment of little boys and girls”. Mr. Tilney, who hasn’t said a word in more than a page (possibly he was busy extracting a pebble from his shoe) now leaps back in with a vengeance:
“That little boys and girls should be tormented…is what no one at all acquainted with human nature in a civilized state can deny; but in behalf of our most distinguished historians, I must observe that they might well be offended at being supposed to have no higher aim, and that by their method and style, they are perfectly well qualified to torment readers of the most advanced reason and mature time of life. I use the verb ‘to torment,’ as I observed to be your own method, instead of ‘to instruct,’ supposing them now to be now admitted as synonymous.”
Windbag.
The subject changes again, as Tilney and his sister turn their attention to the country around them and view it “with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing,” and since Catherine’s always been too much of a spaz to hold a pencil she’s pretty much shut out. She listens to them “with an attention which brought her little profit, for they talked in phrases which conveyed scarcely any idea to her.” At this point, I’d give about a year of my life to see her back in an open carriage with John Thorpe.
But then Austen turns this minor note into a major statement of her own magnificent, life-affirming misanthropy. Catherine’s embarrassment in being ignorant of drawing is “a misplaced shame.”
Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
This is a bracingly mocking assessment of Catherine’s appeal to Tilney; her “administering to his vanity” is the only reason he even bothers looking at her twice. But Catherine “did not know her own advantages—did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward.” This last bit causes those of us who are unrelenting Austenites to flash back to Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, whose life together almost certainly began along exactly these lines. Which doesn’t bode entirely well for Catherine, does it?
Still, this is the Jane Austen I love best: acid, unstinting, and absolutely hilarious.
In the present instance, she confessed and lamented her want of knowledge, declared that she would give anything in the world to be able to draw; and a lecture on the picturesque immediately followed, in which his instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in everything admired by him, and her attention was so earnest that he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of taste…and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when she gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape.
Eventually this topic too runs its course; Henry ventures forth into politics, from which, we’re told, “it was an easy step to silence.” The silence is eventually broken by Catherine saying, “I have heard that something very shocking indeed will soon come out in London.”
Miss Tilney leaps on that, as any fan of novels in general and Udolpho in particular might, and the two girls conjecture whether this very shocking something—which Catherine learned about from a letter received by somebody or other—might involve murder and its like. They’re having a very good time until Henry descends on them again with a page-long performance bathed in irony, beginning “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” and oh for the love of Christ can someone please just push this guy over a cliffside. His sister even cautions him, after he finally concludes by attributing the whole misunderstanding to woman’s inferior wit, that he’s weirding Catherine out: “Miss Morland is not used to your odd ways.” She might be speaking for the rest of us. Unfazed, he asks what he’s supposed to do about it.
“You know what you ought to do. Clear your character handsomely before her. Tell her that you think very highly of the understanding of women.”
“Miss Morland, I think very highly of the understanding of all the women in the world—especially those—whoever they may be—with whom I happen to be in company.”
“That is not enough. Be more serious.”
“Miss Morland, no one can think more highly of the understanding of women than I do. In my opinion, nature has given them so much that they never find it necessary to use more than half.”
He can be funny, I’ll give him that. But he’s also a grandstander and a conversation hog. Except for the impishness of his wit, there’s no material difference between him and Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
Catherine, however, ends the day with stars in her eyes, and the principal benefit of spending so much time with such a relentless talker (if James Thorpe is a rattle, can I call Henry Tilney a prattle?) is that Catherine realizes she hasn’t thought about Isabella or James for hours. She doesn’t even know whether they’ve undertaken the carriage ride to Clifton on not, until she returns to town and runs into a younger Thorpe sister, Anne. “They set off at eight this morning,” Anne tells her, “and I am sure I do not envy them their drive. I think you and I are very well to be out of the scrape. It must be the dullest thing in the world, for there is not a soul at Clifton this time of year.” As to who took Catherine’s place, Anne informs her it was the third Thorpe sister, Maria, who was “quite wild to go.”
“She thought it would be something very fine. I cannot say I admire her taste; and for my part, I was determined from the first not to go, if they pressed me ever so much.”
Sometimes Austen’s genius is just flabbergasting. Here, at the tail end of a chapter—when all she has to do is devise a simple way of conveying to Catherine (and us) that the expedition to Clifton went ahead as planned—Austen manages to astound us by having the information delivered by a character we’ve scarcely met before, in the process granting that character an indelible and completely realized comic life. Anne Thorpe’s searing resentment at having been snubbed in favor of her sister burns through everything she says to the contrary, and it’s hilarious.
A minor character, who lives for barely a page; and yet who for that brief time indelibly etches herself on our minds as a complete comic persona? Yep. We’re in Austen country, all right.

Northanger Abbey, chapters 9-11

In an earlier post, I noted that Northanger Abbey was more Monty Python than Masterpiece Theater. Afterward I felt that might have been a tad glib; so going into this next clutch of chapters, I tried an experiment. As I read, I envisioned the Python troupe in the principal roles. As Catherine, I saw Terry Jones at his most demure and falsetto. As Isabella, Eric Idle at his sliest and teasingest. For John Thorpe, who better than Graham Chapman, master of the loud, bluff, and brusque. For Mr. Tilney, Michael Palin at his most oozingly lounge-lizard. And for Mrs. Allen—my most ingenious bit of casting, I think—John Cleese, all blank-faced and vacuous and blurting out staccato idiocies.
It actually works brilliantly. Now I want to go back and reread the whole novel with these actors in mind. Clearly this is why we’ve never seen a successful screen adaptation of this novel; people keep trying to do it with deadly period restraint, when it calls for merry anarchy. If someone were to undertake it today, I’d suggest doing it entirely in drag. I once saw a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnestin which all the female roles were played by males, and vice-versa, and it completely liberated a play that had become heavy with the weight of its (entirely justified) influences. After the first ten minutes, the novelty of the casting evaporated and only the freedom remained. The same thing could work here. Just a suggestion.
Anyway…we pick up the narrative just after last chapter’s wildly successful ball, with Catherine returning home in an effusion of high spirits (I will continue to picture Terry Jones hopping about and making flutey noises, but you needn’t), and filled with “fresh hopes and fresh schemes” for the next day, the chief of which is to become better acquainted with Miss Tilney. From what we’ve seen of Miss Tilney, this can’t be called a terribly ambitious plan. Catherine might as easily wish to become better acquainted with a streetlight, or a bathtub sponge.
Her idea is to ferret out her quarry at the city’s principal watering hole the next afternoon. Accordingly, come the morning, she occupies herself with Udolpho while waiting for one o’clock to roll around, and is “very little incommoded by the remarks and ejaculations” of her hostess.
[Mrs. Allen’s] vacancy of mind and incapacity for thinking were such, that as she never talked a great deal, so she could never be entirely silent; and, therefore, while she sat at her work, if she lost her needle or broke her thread, if she saw a speck upon her gown, she must observe it aloud, whether there were anyone at leisure to answer her or not.
Passages like this one just knock me for a loop. Yes, Austen has an understanding of human frailty and incapacity worthy of the greatest tragedian; that she instead turns these laser-like insights into comedy—so incisively that a single paragraph can illuminate an entire character in a way only a writer of genius would even attempt—just make me love her all the more. I’m fully confident I’m not alone in this.
Catherine’s plan hits a bump when, at twelve-thirty, two carriages arrive at the house, one of which contains her brother James and Isabella, and from the other of which John Thorpe comes shouting and blustering his way into the house, probably knocking about furniture as he goes so that it’s all left at 45-degree angles behind him.
“Well, Miss Morland, here I am. Have you been waiting long? We could not come before; that old devil of a coachmaker was such an eternity finding out a thing fit to be got into, and now it is ten thousand to one but they break down before we get out of the street. How do you do, Mrs. Allen? A famous ball last night, was it not? Come, Miss Morland, be quick, for the others are in a confounded hurry to be off. They want to get their tumble over.”
In a stage adaptation of Northanger Abbey, every line of John Thorpe’s would include the direction “Enter talking.” Also, “Exit talking.” Also, “Wait backstage for next cue talking.”
Catherine has completely forgotten John’s promise to take her out in his carriage, and, still determined to go to the pump-room and ambush Miss Tilney, she does her best to squirm out of joining him—even to the point of shooting a please-help-me look at Mrs. Allen; a completely wasted gesture. “Mrs. Allen, not being at all in the habit of conveying any expression herself by a look, was not aware of its being ever intended by anybody else.” To get a reaction from this broad, you don’t throw a glance, you throw a cream pie. And even then it’s fifty-fifty.
Catherine sighs in defeat, rushes to her room to get ready, and in about four minutes reappears, “having scarcely allowed the two others time enough to get through a few short sentences in her praise”—despite which, when she and John head outside, Isabella greets her with, “My dearest creature…you have been at least three hours getting ready. I was afraid you were ill.” Isabella really is, at her best, a kind of proto-Lewis Carroll character. The laws of time and space just go cattywampus whenever she’s around.
And her brother, too; like some denizen of Looking-glass Land, whatever he says is pretty much the obverse of whatever Catherine can expect to be the case.
“You will not be frightened, Miss Morland,” said Thorpe, as he handed her in, “if my horse should dance about a little at first setting off. He will, most likely, give a plunge or two, and perhaps take the rest for a minute; but he will soon know his master. He is full of spirits, playful as can be, but there is no vice at him.”
After which the steed in question sets off at the approximate pace of a dray horse on a milk run. When Catherine—relieved by not finding herself attached to some equine tornado—mentions her surprise, John assures her that “it was entirely owing to the peculiarly judicious manner in which he had then held the reins, and the singular discernment and dexterity with which he had directed his whip.”
So far John Thorpe’s function in the novel has been to throw Catherine into a confusion and disrupt her from any of her chosen pursuits, all in the most hilariously awful manner imaginable. But now we get a glimpse of some possible machinations behind his constant reappearances. He abruptly asks Catherine, “Old Allen is a rich as a Jew—is not he?” Catherine, of course taken aback (“taken aback” being pretty much her default mode when she’s with him), manages to say that yes, she believes Mr. Allen is very rich.
“And no children at all?
“No—not any.”
“A famous thing for his next heirs. He is your godfather, is not he?
“My godfather! No.”
“But you are always very much with them.”
“Yes, very much.”
“Aye, that is what I mean. He seems a good kind of fellow enough, and has lived very well in his time, I dare say he is not gouty for nothing. Does he drink his bottle a day now?”
Catherine, scandalized, says of course he doesn’t; Mr. Allen is a very temperate man. John scoffs at this, insisting that “if everybody was to drink their bottle a day, there would not be half the disorders in the world there are now.”
“Oh!” Lord, it would be the saving of thousands. There is not the hundredth part of the wine consumed in this kingdom that there ought to be. Our foggy climate wants help.”
“And yet I have heard that there is a great deal of wine drunk in Oxford.”
“Oxford! There is no drinking at Oxford now, I assure you. Nobody drinks there. You would hardly meet with a man who goes beyond four pints at the utmost.”
His horse may not have much get-up-and-go, but John Thorpe is pretty much running away with this novel. At this point, we’d be okay if the coach ride were to take a side-trip into the Twilight Zone, and just keep going forever—with John blithely yammering away the whole time, first resolutely asserting A, then violently declaring Z, leaving Catherine not knowing “how to reconcile two such very different accounts of the same thing; for she had not been brought up to understand the properties of a rattle, nor to know to how many idle assertions and impudent falsehoods the excess of vanity will lead.”
I’m delighted to have the term “rattle” to apply to John, as it aids in my ongoing project to create a taxonomic encyclopedia of all of Austen’s character types. (I especially like it in conjunction with my classification for his sister Isabella; in fact “Rattle and the Magnificent Shams” may be my next band name.) It’s a brilliantly evocative term for this chapter in particular; you can virtually hear the rattle of John’s voice drowning out that of the carriage wheels.
He told [Catherine] of horses which he had bought for a trifle and sold for incredible sums; of racing matches, in which his judgment had infallibly foretold the winner; of shooting parties, in which he had killed more birds (though without having one good shot) than all his companions together; and described to her some famous day’s sport, with the fox-hounds, in which his foresight and skill in directing the dogs had repaired the mistakes of the most experienced huntsman, and in which the boldness of his riding, though it had never endangered his own life for a moment, had been constantly leading others into difficulties, which he calmly concluded had broken the necks of many.
Catherine listens to all this, and—give the girl props; she’s slow on the uptake, but she ain’t stupid—“she could not entirely repress a doubt, while she bore with the effusions of his endless conceit, of his being altogether completely agreeable.” And by the time he’s delivered her back to the Allens’ house in Pulteney Street, she’s moved “to distrust his powers of giving universal pleasure.” Smack-downs you have to think about for a minute are the best kind. Except of course if you’re on the receiving end of one.
As Catherine steps down from the carriage, Isabella—from the carriage behind—is in a state of wild wonderment that the time is now past three o’clock.
It was inconceivable, incredible, impossible! And she would neither believe her own watch, nor her brother’s, nor the servant’s; she would believe no assurance of it founded on reason or reality, till Morland produced his watch, and ascertained the fact; to have doubted a moment longer then would have been equally inconceivable, incredible, and impossible; and she could only protest, over and over again, that no two hours and a half had ever gone off so swiftly before, as Catherine was called on to confirm…
Catherine, of course, feels like it’s been two-and-a-half years; but Isabella is “spared the misery of her friend’s dissenting voice, by not waiting for her answer.” Then she and John (and James) are off again, with Isabella still not having managed to find time for even one of the “thousands of things to say” to Catherine that she’s been just perishingto divulge.
I like to imagine a meal at the Thorpe household. My guess is that the conversation consists mainly of gasps and declamations, things like I have never encountered such profoundly sublime Brussels sprouts, from what heavenly bower were they harvested, I would only that I were worthy to partake of such excellence as these divine Brussels sprouts, but in all humility I must content myself with common cake; followed by, Once I killed a wolf with Brussels sprouts, it had made off with a village child, and lacking my gun I pelted it instead with sprouts and such was the force of my arm, the deadly accuracy of my aim, and the mastery of my knowledge of lupine anatomy, that I was able to bring down the beast with but an half dozen fruit.
Anyway…Catherine’s wretched day gets even wretcheder when Mrs. Allen informs her that, while Catherine was busy being shanghaied by John Thorpe, she herself was at the pump-room, swanning about with the Tilneys and getting the full back-story on their family from Mrs. Hughes, who’s known them basically forever.
“And what did she tell you of them?”
“Oh! a vast deal indeed; she hardly talked of anything else.”
“Did she tell you what part of Glouchestershire they come from?”
“Yes, she did; but I cannot recollect now. But they are very good kind of people, and very rich. Mrs. Tilney was a Miss Drummond, and she and Mrs. Hughes were schoolfellows; and Miss Drummond had a very large fortune; and, when she married, her father gave her twenty thousand pounds, and five hundred to buy wedding-clothes. Mrs. Hughes saw all the clothes after they came from the warehouse.”
“And are Mr. and Mrs. Tilney in Bath?”
“Yes, I fancy they are, but I am not quite certain.”
Austen has used a similar comic bit before, in Mansfield Park, when indolent, semi-conscious Lady Bertram frustrates Fanny Price by being able to relate only fragments of gossip from a ball the night before—remembering that someone had said something pointed about Fanny or her brother, but none of the particulars. Yet it’s still funny this time around; funnier, even, for the addition of Mrs. Allen being razor-sharp on details of costume and dress, where she’s fuzzy on everything else—including whether the persons in question are even among the living; because it turns out that Mrs. Tilney, of whose presence in Bath Mrs. Allen isn’t certain, is in fact no longer present anywhere on the planet, nor has been for some years. (Had Mrs. Hughes only thought to comment on the gown she was buried in, Mrs. Allen would’ve remembered, damn straight.)
So Catherine has to endure the frustration of not only having missed the Tilney sibs, but of having missed an opportunity for learning all about them—an opportunity Mrs. Allen completely and characteristically squandered.
The day ends with a trip to the theatre, where Catherine is finally reunited with Isabella and can now hear the thousand things her friend’s been longing to tell her—which disappointingly come down to nothing more than how sick she is of Bath, and how she wishes she could leave it, and how she was telling Catherine’s brother about it only to learn he feels the same.
“We soon found that our tastes were exactly alike in preferring the country to every other place; really, our opinions were so exactly the same, it was quite ridiculous!...I would not have had you by for the world; you are such a sly thing, I am sure you would have made some droll remark or other about it.”
“No, indeed I should not.”
“Oh, yes you would indeed; I know you better than you know yourself. You would have told us that we seemed born for each other, or some such nonsense of that kind, which would have distressed me beyond conception; my cheeks would have been as red as roses; I would not have had you by me for the world.”
Catherine tries to explain that she could die and be reincarnated eight thousand times, and nothing like that was ever coming from her lips; but by this time Isabella is doing the looking-like-I’m-listening-without-listening thing she’s so good at, then she turns and spends the rest of the evening talking to James.
This only ratchets up Catherine’s desire to hook up with Miss Tilney, who, from their brief acquaintance, seems less likely to treat Catherine like a supporting character in her Lifetime biopic who doesn’t have any lines so ahem why must she keep speaking. And so the next day at the pump-room, Catherine, “with a firmer determination to be acquainted, than she might have had courage to command, had she not been urged by the disappointment of the day before”, pretty much launches herself at Miss Tilney the moment that unsuspecting girl shows her face at the pump-room—possibly jumping up and licking her face, like an overexcited malamute.
Miss Tilney, who’s accompanied by Mrs. Hughes, meets her “with great civility” and the two girls go on to do some serious hanging out.
…[T]hey continued talking together as long as both parties remained in the room; and though in all probability not an observation was made, nor an expression used by either which had not been made and used some thousands of times before, under that roof, in every Bath season, yet the merit of their being spoken with simplicity and truth, and without personal conceit, might be something uncommon.
Yeah, or it mmmmight not.
This is my objection to Miss Tilney; she kind of sinks the novel every time she shows up. She’s so bland that even Austen can’t summon the energy to report on what she actually says, beyond the briefest summary of it. And meanwhile over on the other side of the room, Isabella Thorpe is having an emotional seizure every thirty-five seconds, and personally narrating each one of them for the benefit of potential eavesdroppers, so yeah I’m pretty sure I know whom I’d rather have Catherine palling around with.
Catherine asks Miss Tilney several questions about her brother, probably thinking she’s being circumspect enough, but it turns out Miss Tilney’s wits aren’t nearly as dull as her conversation. They part, “on Miss Tilney’s side with some knowledge of her new acquaintance’s feelings, and on Catherine’s without the smallest consciousness of having explained them.”
Catherine’s all agog because she’s managed to learn that Mr. Tilney will be at the cotillion ball the next night. Immediately she starts to plot what she’ll wear, which Austen—not in the habit of censuring her heroines—takes a harsh view of. “Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.” What’s more, its own aim is pretty much bogus to begin with.
It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire; how little it is biased by the texture of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull, or the jackonet. Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter.
Once again, Austen has provided us with a little lecture that seems entirely at cross-purposes with her narrative. Earlier, as we’ve seen, she made a spirited case for the merit of the novel, which sits rather oddly in the pages of a story illustrating the novel’s chief demerits (far from enlarging Catherine’s mind and understanding, novel-reading corrupts both). Now here she scolds women for thinking any man would ever look twice at what she’s wearing, after having previously introduced a hero—Mr. Tilney—who would not only look at it, but appraise it, critique it, guess its market value, and offer tips for improvement next time. Austen was a meticulous writer and a diligent reviser, so this can’t be carelessness; she really must be playing a very sophisticated game here—giddily subverting her own authorial voice. Why? I suppose, because she can. It’s part of the irresistible playfulness that’s inherent in her character.
The cotillion ball rolls around, and Catherine enters the rooms “with feeling very different from what had attended her thither the Monday before. She had then been exulting in her engagement to Thorpe, and was now chiefly anxious to avoid his sight, lest he should engage her again”—because she’s determined to keep her dance card cleared for Tilney. When the Thorpes show up and join her party, Catherine “fidgeted about if John Thorpe came towards her, hid herself as much as possible from his view, and when he spoke to her pretended not to hear him.”
This gambit is successful enough, as Mr. Tilney does find her and—sunshine! lollipops! rainbows!—asks her to take a whirl with him. But alas, as she heads to the floor she’s waylaid by John, who says, “Heyday, Miss Morland!...What is the meaning of this! I thought you and I were to dance together.” Catherine sputters, b-b-but you never asked me; forgetting of course that this is John Thorpe, who’s more than willing to retcon any given situation.
“That is a good one, by Jove! I asked you as soon as I came into the room, and I was just going to ask you again, but when I turned round, you were gone! This is a cursed shabby trick!...And here I have been telling all my acquaintance that I was going to dance with the prettiest girl in the room; and when they see you standing up with somebody else, they will quiz me famously.”
He then jealously asks who the hell the joker makin’ time with his lady is, anyway. Catherine answers that it is Mr. Tilney. “Tilney,” he repeats. “Hum—I do not know him. A good figure of a man; well put together. Does he want a horse? Here is a friend of mine, Fletcher, has got one to sell that would suit anybody. A famous clever animal for the road—only forty guineas.”
When Catherine finally escapes him, she doesn’t find much relief in Mr. Tilney’s arms; he’s a little ticked off that some deadbeat has tried to make off with his dance partner, which is, in his eyes, pretty much beyond the pale. “We have entered into a contract of mutual agreeableness for the space of an evening,” he insists, “and all our agreeableness belongs solely to each other for that time. Nobody can fasten themselves on the notice of one, without injuring the rights of the other.” He then goes on in a way that, I’m sorry, I can’t help finding just a leeetle bit creepy.
“I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both, and those men who do not choose to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbours.”
We begin to see Tilney as the kind of guy who has crazy proprietary ideas about everything, and wouldn’t be surprised to hear he shoots dogs who dare to stray onto his grounds, or beats his sister if she puts the soap back on the wrong side of the sink.
Catherine has enough spirit to challenge his comparison of a country-dance to a marriage; probably he delivered it with a charming smile so that she doesn’t actually worry about him sealing her up beneath the floorboards of his room anytime soon. But he answers her challenge by digging in deeper.
“You will allow, that in both, man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal; that in both, it is an engagement between man and woman, formed for the advantage of each, and that when once entered into, they belong exclusively to the other till the moment of its dissolution: that it is their duty, each to endeavour to give the other no cause for wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves elsewhere, and their best interest to keep their own imaginations from wandering towards the perfections of their neighbours, or fancying that they should have been better off with anyone else. You will allow this?”
People who say things like “You will allow this?” usually do so in the kind of tone that makes it clear you’d bettergoddamn well allow it. Suddenly we’re all realizing why Miss Tilney is such a meek little mouse. Every opinion she’s ever dared to express has probably brought her brother down on her like Cotton Mather or Savonarola.
So…yeah. Not much liking Henry Tilney, here.
He eventually concludes with, “Have I not reason to fear that if the gentleman who spoke to you just now were to return, or if any other gentleman were to address you, there would be nothing to restrain you from conversing with him as long as you chose?” Catherine explains that John Thorpe is her brother’s “particular friend” and so yeah, she’s obliged to speak to him; but she even doesn’t know any other men, so hey, no risk. Which isn’t enough reassurance for Tilney, who keeps at her until she’s goaded into saying, fine, all right, she doesn’t want to talk to anyone but him.
Flash forward five years, it wouldn’t surprise us to find Catherine living barefoot and pregnant in a shed somewhere, entirely cut off from the rest of the world by her wildly jealous husband. I mean, we’ve already seen he’s more than willing to buy all her clothes for her. Catherine, sweetheart…watch out.
Now that Tilney’s vanity is appeased, he slips back into Oscar Wilde mode, tossing off witticisms like a king casting coins from a balcony.
“Bath, compared with London, has little variety, and so everybody finds out every year. ‘For six weeks, I allow Bath is pleasant enough; but beyond that, it is the most tiresome place in the world.’ You would be told so by people of all descriptions, who come regularly every winter, lengthen their six weeks into ten or twelve, and go away at least because they can afford to stay no longer.”
Ha-bloody-ha. Sorry, dude, still a little too weirded out by the whole “dancing is marriage” thing to go back to being charmed by your cunning little quips.
I know Austen’s making an effort here, but Henry Tilney is just too chilly on one hand, too smooth on the other, to be remotely—much less entirely—likeable. Everything he does or says seems to be done or said for effect. We’re accustomed to Austen heroes being gruff, blunt, even borderline inarticulate (think Edward Ferrars); this smiling, silver-tongued jackal can’t help setting off some serious alarm bells.
But when you get right down to it, Northanger Abbey, unlike its predecessors in Austen’s canon, isn’t about its hero and heroine. As I’ve noted before, it owes much more to Austen’s juvenilia, those wild stories in which plots took hairpin turns and heroines (and heroes) fell constant prey to capricious, often outright malicious, fates. Northanger Abbey is a narrative, yes, but it’s also a feat; it’s a conjuring trick. It’s Jane Austen showing us, with magnificent sleight of hand, that novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho, when overlaid with the rational, workaday world, become lurid and ridiculous. The shades and nuances of everyday life provide a relief against which melodramatic plot contrivances appear loud and obvious and…well, funny. Boisterously, laugh-out-loud funny.
We get the beginning of one such plot thread now.
Catherine perceived herself to be earnestly regarded by a gentleman who stood among the lookers-on, immediately behind her partner. He was a very handsome man, of a commanding aspect, past the bloom, but not past the vigour of life; and with his eye still directed towards her, she saw him presently address Mr. Tilney in a familiar whisper.
Catherine starts to wilt under this mysterious figure’s gaze, until Tilney returns and explains, “That gentleman knows your name, and you have a right to know his. It is General Tilney, my father.”
An introduction like this one—a man appearing suddenly from within a crowd, piercing the heroine’s reserve with his unyielding gaze, then being revealed as someone very close to him on whom she’s settled her hopes—in a gothic novel, this is the set-up for a character who embodies the concepts of both rogue nature and indomitable destiny. And in fact General Tilney will be central to Catherine’s coming crisis, but not in any way she’s been conditioned by Mrs. Radcliffe to expect.
But before that happens, we still have some Bath business to get through. First involves a country-walk, which the Tilneys, frère et soeur, are amazed to learn Catherine hasn’t yet undertaken since arriving in town. They resolve to go together the very next morning, at twelve o’clock. Catherine’s so stoked for this that she repeats “Twelve o’clock, right?” about nineteen times, and does everything but beg the Tilneys to synchronize their watches.
But alas, she rises to find the sky overcast and threatening, and she’s worried it’s going to rain. “She applied to Mrs. Allen, and Mrs. Allen’s opinion was more positive. ‘She had no doubt in the world of its being a very fine day, if the clouds would only go off, and the sun keep out.’ ” Way to hedge your bets, Mrs. A. Of course when the rain does come, she’s all, “I thought how it would be.”
The rain keeps up, “fast, though not heavy,” and Austen does a fine job of carrying us through Catherine’s anxiety as she alternately monitors the weather and the hour, which draws ever closer to noon. And when the clock strikes twelve with still no abatement of the rain, she still doesn’t give up hope, deciding to give it another fifteen minutes. Which works about as well as that usually does.
“There, it is twenty minutes after twelve, and now I shall give it up entirely. Oh! That we had such weather here as they had at Udolpho, or at least in Tuscany and the south of France!—the night that poor St. Aubin died!—such beautiful weather!”
Heh. Novels.
But then, whaddaya know—at half past the sky starts to clear, and twenty minutes later it’s a freakin’ beautiful day. (Mrs. Allen, of course, “always thought it would clear up.” But it’s now so long after the appointed hour for the country walk, that Catherine has no idea whether it’s still on or not.
She decides to stay put just in case the Tilneys call; but it’s not the Tilneys who show up. It’s the same two carriages that took her by surprise a few mornings back, and suddenly here’s John Thorpe again, bumping into end-tables and upsetting umbrella stands, and blaring, “Make haste! Make haste!...Put on your hat this moment—there is no time to be lost—we are going to Bristol! How d’ye do, Mrs. Allen?”
At the best of times, Catherine would balk at this—such a distance, and with John honking endlessly in her ear the whole way—but today it’s out of the question, and she tells him so; she’s already engaged to go for a country walk. As expected, John reacts as though she’s said she’s already engaged to weave dandelion chains on the front lawn. What’s a stupid outdoor walk compared to Bristol, and all that they’ll see along the way?...Including—and here’s where he unwittingly hits the bull’s-eye—Blaize Castle. Catherine’s ears immediately perk up, and she wants to know more.
“What, is it really a castle, an old castle?”
“The oldest in the kingdom.”
“But is it like what one reads of?”
“Exactly—the very same.”
“But now really—are there towers and long galleries?”
“By dozens.”
That’s got her humming! The actual chance to see an actual castle, and possibly stand upon the very flagstones where a rape or a murder or a disembowelment occurred…what young girl could desire more? But alas, she still has to refuse; she’s been expecting the Tilneys since noon, she explains, and she dares say they’ll be here soon. Possibly they were just arriving, and John’s carriage ran them over. Austen doesn’t say, but I’ll bet Catherine peeks out the window to check.
But John, hearing that it’s the Tilneys she’s awaiting, dashes her hopes by telling her he’s seen Mr. Tilney, already out and about in Broad Street—“does he not drive a phaeton with bright chestnuts?...I saw him at that moment turn up the Lansdown Road, driving a smart-looking girl.” Catherine still resists; after all, they may still mean to come for her—but John quashes this as well, saying that he heard Tilney “halooing to a man who was just passing by on horseback, that they were going as far as Wick Rocks.”
John seems to have a lot of ready intelligence to persuade Catherine to do exactly what he wants her to do. And we’ve already seen what a tenuous (i.e. nonexistent) relationship he has with the truth. If he had to, he’d swear he saw a large eagle swoop down and carry both Tilney and his sister off towards the sea. But Catherine’s social survival skills aren’t quite as honed as our own, and she accepts what he’s said as gospel. The lure of Blaize Castle, of course, isn’t exactly a disincentive.
Still, she’s in a bit of a funk as she climbs into John’s carriage. “She could not think the Tilneys had acted quite well by her, in so readily giving up their engagement, without sending her any message of excuse.” And may I just pause here a moment—not to detract from Austen’s genius; never that—merely to lament that we who write comedies of manners in the 21st century are at such a complete disadvantage due to modern technology? There’s so much of Northanger Abbey—so much of many of Austen’s novels—that would fall to pieces if the characters were just able to, say, text message each other. I’m not claiming Austen had it easy—God knows it’s a backbreaking job to assemble these kinds of plots, which can only advance by precisely timed missed connections, miscommunications, and mistaken identities—but dang if she didn’t have it easier.
So Catherine is jogging away in John Thorpe’s carriage, meditating, “by turns, on broken promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trap-doors” (who’s a writer then? Oh hell yes, she is), when out of the blue John asks her, “Who is that girl who looked at you so hard as she went by?” Catherine’s all who-what-where for a moment, till she turns and sees Miss Tilney and her brother both looking back at her.
The following page is pretty much a series of variations on Oh oh stop Mr. Thorpe stop at once I must go back to Miss Tilney stop and let me descend Mr. Thorpe how could you deceive me so Miss Thorpe Miss Thorpe I cannot go on how vexed they must be stop stop stop stop stop stop stop.
Mr. Thorpe does not stop.
He does say—“very stoutly”—regarding that earlier apparition heading towards Wick Rocks, that “he had never seen two men so much alike in his life, and would hardly give up the point of its having been Tilney himself.” Which rather hilariously implies that he’s the kind of man who’d give up the point on anything. Ever.
Catherine’s in an agony over what the Tilneys must think of her. Her only comfort is to look forward to Blaize Castle, and “the happiness of being stopped in their way along narrow, winding vaults, by a low, grated door; or even of having a lamp, their only lamp, extinguished by a sudden gust of wind, and of being left in total darkness.”
But even this cavalcade of pleasures is snatched from her some time later, when from the second carriage her brother James calls that they’d better turn around, they’ll never make it to Bristol and back before dark. John takes this about as well as you’d expect. “If your brother had not such a d— beast to drive,” he tells Catherine, “we might have done it very well…Morland is a fool for not keeping a horse and gig of his own.” Catherine defends James by pointing out that he can’t afford it. To which John remarks on “its being a d— thing to be miserly; and that if people who rolled in money could not afford things, he did not know who could, which Catherine did not even endeavour to understand.”
So Catherine’s deposited back in Pulteney Street, where she’s mortified to learn from the footman (another one of those unnamed Jane Austen stick-figures in livery) that a gentleman and lady had called for her “and that the lady had asked whether any message had been left for her, and on his saying no, had felt for a card, but said she had none about her, and went away.”
And there’s no opportunity for Catherine to explain the mishap to the Tilneys that night, because the Allens bring her to spend the evening at the Thorpes’—with Isabella ladling on the misery by continually exclaiming about how happy she is not to be at the ball at the Lower Rooms, and how much she pities the poor sad sacks who are stuck there while shegets to be all cozy and private with all her super-specialist friends and family. After half a page of this, you have to admire Catherine’s self-command in not hurling the nearest paperweight at her head.
Austen concludes:
And now I may dismiss my heroine to the sleepless couch, which is the true heroine’s portion; to a pillow strewed with thorns and wet with tears. And lucky may she think herself, if she get another good night’s rest in the course of the next three months.
Of course, Austen is the one who decides whether that good night’s rest happens or not. Will she relent, and take pity on her heroine, and spare her any further calamities? Bugger will she.

Northanger Abbey, chapters 6-8

More than any other novel in her canon, Northanger Abbey gives the impression of Jane Austen having an almost indecent amount of fun. Chapter 6 is a case in point—right from its opening lines:
The following conversation, which took place between the two friends in the pump-room one morning, after an acquaintance of eight or nine days, is given as a specimen of their very warm attachment, and of the delicacy, discretion, originality of thought, and literary taste which marked the reasonableness of that attachment.
If her tongue were any more firmly embedded in her cheek, it might pierce on through to the other side. Because what follows is, of course, the equivalent of watching two crazed baboons flinging their feces at each other.
As soon as they meet, the two girls fall into a discussion of the latest book Catherine has undertaken, which Isabella has already read. It’s an extremely enthusiastic discussion, because it turns out that Isabella is, if anything, a more slavish devotee of gothic novels than her new BFF. The novel in question is Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Catherine admits that she has “been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil.”
Isabella, in the superior manner of persons everywhere who hold privileged information, says, “How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are you not wild to know?” Oh hell yeah she is.
“Oh! Yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me—I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton. I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton! Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.”
Isabella is tickled pink over Catherine’s fanaticism, and promises her she has a whole slew of novels—just “ten or twelve more”—that work the same kind of ghoulish magic. She recites their names for her: “Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries.”
So, yeah, right there is the sterling evidence of their “literary taste”—not to mention the “delicacy, discretion, and originality of thought”—that Austen promised us in the first paragraph. But in case that hasn’t driven home the point, Isabella reassures her friend that all the books are all “horrid,” which she has on the authority of one Miss Andrews, a friend of hers who was read them all, and who is “as beautiful as an angel, and I am so vexed with the men for not admiring her! I scold them amazingly about it.”
“I told Captain Hunt at one of our assemblies this winter that if he was to tease me all night, I would not dance with him, unless he would allow Miss Andrews to be as beautiful as an angel. The men think us incapable of real friendship, you know, I am determined to show them the difference.”
A few beats later, while comparing Miss Andrews to Catherine, Isabella admits, “you have so much animation, which is exactly what Miss Andrews wants, for I must confess there is something amazingly insipid about her.”
If that turnaround hasn’t given you whiplash, just buckle your seatbelt, baby. A page later we find Isabella scheming to dress exactly like Catherine that for that evening’s assembly, because “The men take notice of that sometimes, you know.” When Catherine ventures to say it doesn’t signify if they do, Isabella can’t wait to agree with her.
“Signify! Oh, heavens! I make it a rule never to mind what they say. They are very often amazingly impertinent if you do not treat them with spirit, and make them keep their distance…They give themselves such airs. They are the most conceited creatures in the world, and think themselves of so much importance! By the by, though I have thought of it a hundred times, I have always forgot to ask you what is your favorite complexion in a man. Do you like them best dark or fair?”
I’ve often said what a shame it is that Austen never wrote for the stage, but the chapter under discussion is in fact eminently stageable. In fact, it would make a tremendous audition piece for a comic actress. (Geraldine McEwan did a recording of it that is absolutely gasp-inducing.) Isabella Thorpe is, I believe, the first example in English literature of a character type I like to call the Magnificent Sham. There’s Falstaff, of course; but Falstaff was so much more. And I’m really talking about the female of the species, as perhaps most memorably incarnated in E.F. Benson’s Lucia. But Lucia’s Magnificent Shammery is exquisitely calibrated; she’s like an oil painter. Though come to think of it, so is Isabella. But in that sense Lucia recalls Sir Edwin Landseer; Isabella, Jackson Pollack.
The Magnificent Sham is a character type who devotes most of her energies to expounding things she doesn’t believe, proposing activities she’ll never follow through on, and presenting herself as more or less the polar opposite of who she really is in any given situation. We’ve already seen Isabella declare her complete indifference to men and her desire to keep the dirty bastiches as far away from her as possible, all expressed in terms that deafeningly trumpet the reverse. Now we see how she acts when two smart young turks come swaggering onto the scene.
“For heaven’s sake! Let us move away from this end of the room. Do you know, there are two odious young men who have been staring at me this half hour. They really put me quite out of countenance. Let us go and look at the arrivals. They will hardly follow us there…They are not coming this way, are they? I hope they are not so impertinent as to follow us. Pray let me know if they are coming. I am determined I will not look up.”
When Catherine, “with unaffected pleasure,” assures her that in fact the scoundrels have given up and departed, Isabella whirls in a panic. “And which way are they gone?...One was a very good-looking young-man.” And when Catherine informs her of the direction in which the pair decamped, Isabella decides it’s really time for her to show Catherine the hat she means to buy, whose shop is, just totally, coincidentally, and entirely unrelated to anything else, in that same direction. Catherine, completely missing the point, warns her that “perhaps we may overtake the two young men.” Never mind that, Isabella, says; if they keep a swift pace, they can just sweep right past them.
“But if we only wait a few minutes, there will be no danger of our seeing them at all.”
“I shall not pay them any such compliment, I assure you. I have no notion of treating men with such respect. That is the way to spoil them.”
And off they go, on a complete and utter tear. If Isabella had a lariat, she’d be looping it as she ran, and you wouldn’t give either of those two dudes odds of ending their walk in any way other than roped, tied, and slung across the roof of her pickup.
Fortunately for their quarry, Isabella and Catherine are blocked in their pursuit by some “odious gigs,” one of which then obligingly disgorges their respective brothers: James Morland and John Thorpe. Austen doesn’t often resort to this sort of naked contrivance, so we allow it this once, especially as we’re interested in seeing how quickly Isabella changes her tack and sets her net instead for James. The answer being, in less time than it took you to read this sentence.
James Morland is your basic decent, bland brother type (another William Price—if you can even remember William Price). So he’s basically putty in Isabella’s hands, and there’s no real excitement in watching her lay claim to him. She could work him like Silly Putty—stretching him this way, pulling him that, then bouncing to a corner of the room and back—and he’d never utter a word of protest. John Thorpe, on the other hand, is more roughly hewn, and quickly becomes a creation of significant comic brio in his own right. Clearly the Thorpe DNA has some pretty funky monkey in it.
He was a stout young man of middling height, who, with a plain face and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he wore the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be easy.
His initial salvo at Catherine—being a cosmopolitan man of the world, don’t’cha know—is to ask how long she thinks it took them to arrive at Bath from Tetbury, because if there’s one thing a girl likes better than discussing road conditions, it’s being made to guess traveling times. Catherine, of course, has no idea how off far Tetbury is (he could tell her they crossed two continents and ocean and she wouldn’t blink), so her brother tells her it was twenty-three miles.
“Three and twenty?” cried Thorpe. “Five and twenty if it is an inch.” Morland remonstrated, pleaded the authority of road-books, innkeepers, and milestones; but his friend disregarded them all; he had a surer sense of distance. “I know it must be five and twenty,” said he, “by the time we have been doing it. It is now half after one; we drove out of the inn-yard at Tetbury as the town clock struck eleven; and I defy any man in England to make my horse go less than ten miles and hour in harness; that makes it exactly twenty-five.”
“You have lost an hour,” said Morland; “it was only ten o’clock when we came from Tetbury.”
“Ten o’clock! It was eleven, upon my soul! I counted every stroke.”
Yep, he’s a blowhard—another of my favorites in Austen’s repertoire of character types. He hammers away at Catherine for another full page, not only bragging about the features of his gig but chronicling the negotiations by which he purchased it, because again, young girls just get all swoony over hearing what a man has paid for everything.
“He asked fifty guineas; I closed with him directly, threw down the money, and the carriage was mine.”
“And I am sure,” said Catherine, “I know so little of such things that I cannot judge whether it was cheap or dear.”
“Neither one nor t’other; I might have got it for less, I dare say; but I hate haggling, and poor Freeman wanted cash.”
“That was very good-natured of you,” said Catherine, quite pleased.
“Oh! D— it, when one has the means of doing a kind thing by a friend, I hate to be pitiful.”
At this point, you have to wonder if he’s even bothering to keep track of what impression he’s striving to make. His rule of thumb seems to be, say whatever’s most likely to take Catherine off-guard.
The boys join the girls on their outing to the shop, and so happy is Isabella to be paired off with James Morland, “who brought the double recommendation of being her brother’s friend, and her friend’s brother,” that when they finally overtake the pair of stud-muffins they’d originally set off in pursuit of, Catherine “was so far from seeking to attract their notice, that she looked back at them only three times.”
Austen is just heaping our plates high here. She’s in such tremendous form that she keeps slicing off slab after slab of blood-red comedy, and somehow there still seems to be a whole quivering roast left to carve. All of Austen’s novels are comic masterpieces, but Northanger Abbey is a goddamn trip to the trough. If you read too much in one sitting, you risk bloat.
John Thorpe, squiring Catherine, resumes talk of his gig, because what else is he going to chat about with a girl? He asks whether Catherine likes riding in an open carriage, and when she says yes, he says, “I will drive you out in mine every day.” Catherine insists needn’t do that, because for one thing, when would his horse rest?
“Rest! He has only come three and twenty miles today; all nonsense; nothing ruins horses so much as rest; nothing knocks them up so soon. No, no; I shall exercise mine at the average of four hours a day every day while I am here.”
If you’re paying attention, you’ll note that John has retreated to the twenty-three-mile assessment he’d earlier gone postal in rejecting. He clearly isn’t keeping track of anything he’s saying, nor worrying about any of it catching up with him. If Catherine were to tell him she prefers yachting to riding, he’d just tell her, My carriage is perfectly seaworthy, we set sail for France tomorrow, and yes of course my horse can swim.
Catherine in her naiveté is flattered by John’s attentions, despite them being so impersonal that she might be snatched from his side and replaced with an entirely different girl while his head is turned, and he’d never notice. So he tries her damnedest to find some common ground with him—and since her only possible common ground with anyone is novels, she asks whether he’s read Udolpho. “Oh, Lord!” he scoffs. “Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.” He goes on to call novels “the stupidest things in creation.”
But Catherine, having nothing else to offer, soldiers on. “I think you must like Udolpho, if you were to read it; it is so very interesting.”
“Not I, faith! No, if I read any, it shall be Mrs. Radcliffe’s; her novels are amusing enough; they are worth reading; some fun and nature in them.”
“Udolphowas written by Mrs. Radcliffe,” said Catherine, with some hesitation, from the fear of mortifying him.
“No sure; was it? Aye, I remember, so it was; I was thinking of that other stupid book, written by that woman they make such a fuss about, she who married the French emigrant.”
So, yeah, no worries about mortifying him. He is un-mortifiable. His self-regard is so invincible that even when he’s proven wrong, it rolls right off him, like canola oil off of Teflon.
They arrive at Mrs. Thorpe’s lodgings where, Austen tells us—again firing satirical full-metal-jackets—John’s literary pronunciations give way to “the feelings of the dutiful and affection son, as they met Mrs. Thorpe, who had descried them from above, in the passage.” The form his duty and affection manifests is his saying, “Ah! Mother! How do you do?...Where did you get that quiz of a hat? It makes you look like an old witch.”
And this address seemed to satisfy all the fondest wishes of the mother’s heart, for she received him with the most delighted and exulting affection. On his two younger sisters he then bestowed an equal portion of his fraternal tenderness, for he asked each of them how they did, and observed that they both looked very ugly.
So, okay; we 21st century types are thinking we’d probably be more comfortable hanging with a bunch of congenial sociopaths like the Thorpes than with ice queen Mrs. Allen and her card-shark husband. After all, most of us have friends or family members like John, who have to bore you with every excruciating factoid about their new tech purchases, or how much Rolling Rock they drank the night before or whatever, and we’re used to just ignoring them—or telling them (as James Morland does here, whenever possible), “You’re full of crap, pass the Tabasco.” But poor, sheltered Catherine is shocked by these manners, and is only prevented from shying away from these people forever by John engaging her to dance that evening. Because, remember, with Catherine, being in love is essentially a matter of whoever’s right there, and bothering to ask.
Catherine’s pretty ginned up about being engaged by a partner before the dance begins, because it kicks so much social anxiety right to the curb. At least in theory. In practice, not so much, because when everyone assembles that night, and the dancing begins, John goes off to the card room to speak to a friend (no doubt to brag about how much his shoes cost him, or to dare his friend to punch him in the stomach, no really, just try and see what happens), and Catherine’s left seated on the sidelines, a wallflower still. Her brother James, who has himself pre-engaged Isabella, is eager to collect on the debt; but Isabella refuses to dance with him until Catherine can join in too, absolutely not, do you hear me, no, no, never. Catherine is grateful for this kindness; but of course Isabella’s moral rectitude ceases to exist the moment she invokes it, so that when James asks again, she immediately caves, and Catherine is left sandwiched between Mrs. Thorpe and Mrs. Allen, which is exactly nobody’s idea of a good time.
To be disgraced in the eye of the world, to wear the appearance of infamy while her heart is all purity, her actions all innocence, and the misconduct of another the true source of her debasement, is one of those circumstances which peculiarly belong to the heroine’s life, and her fortitude under it what particularly dignifies her character. Catherine had fortitude too; she suffered, but no murmur passed her lips.
Things only get worse for her, because who should now waltz in (perhaps literally) but Mr. Tilney. He approaches without seeing her, “and therefore the smile and the blush, which his sudden reappearance raised in Catherine, passed away without sullying her heroic importance.” Austen’s just laying it on with a trowel here; you almost start to worry, the way you do when someone’s had too much to drink and insists on dancing on a tabletop. You know you should really want her to stop, but have to admit it’s more fun to watch; and Austen gets a few can-can style kicks in, going on to introduce a young lady in Tilney’s company, whom Catherine instantly deduces must be his sister; “and therefore, instead of turning a deathlike paleness and falling in a fit on Mrs. Allen’s bosom, Catherine sat erect, in the perfect use of her senses, and with cheeks only a little redder than usual.”
Then Tilney sees her, and after a few social niceties—paying his respects to Mrs. Allen, introducing his sister, being introduced to Mrs. Thorpe, and explaining that he’d only just returned to Bath after several days away—his first order of business is to ask Catherine to dance. But Catherine can’t accept, because she’s engaged by John Thorpe (what wouldn’t she give to be able to hop in a TARDIS and go back and shoot herself in the foot before she agreed to that), “and in giving her denial, she expressed her sorrow on the occasion so very much as if she really felt it that had Thorpe, who joined her just afterwards, been half a minute earlier, he might have thought her sufferings rather too acute.”
John is pretty blasé about having kept her twisting in the wind, and his charm doesn’t increase once he leads her onto the floor; he spends their dance together blathering on about “the horses and dogs of the friend whom he had just left, and of a proposed exchange of terriers between them,” leaving Catherine to scan the floor longingly for Tilney, without ever seeing him, and for Isabella and James, who likewise might as well be gavotting on Mars for all the good it does her.
She was separated from all her party, and away from all acquaintance; one mortification succeeded another, and from the whole she deduced this useful lesson, that to go previously engaged to a ball does not necessarily increase either the dignity or enjoyment of a young lady.
In fact, it can pretty much chap the young lady’s ass. But never mind, relief is on the way in the form of Miss Tilney, who attaches herself to Catherine’s clique, and who proves to be a high-toned filly, with real taste and breeding and bearing—in other words, your basic anti-Isabella. Austen even makes the comparison herself, pointing out that Miss Tilney is perfectly capable of being at a ball “without wanting to fix the attention of every man near her, and without exaggerated feelings of ecstatic delight or inconceivable vexation on every little trifling occurrence.” Of course she immediately bores us silly. I mean, good for her, and everything. But when we read the careful, polite way she and Catherine circle around each other, “going through the first rudiments of an acquaintance, by informing themselves how well the other liked Bath, how much she admired its buildings and surrounding country, whether she drew, or played, or sang, and whether she was fond of riding on horseback”—frankly, we’re ready to give a year of a our lives for Isabella to burst back in, complaining of excessive ravishment and swearing she’s on the verge of perishing and possibly just picking up the entire punch bowl and guzzling from it straight.
And whaddaya know, here she is, trailing James behind her like a vestigial tail and acting like she hasn’t seen Catherine since the Iron Age. She’s so verbose that it’s a few moments before Catherine can point out Miss Tilney to her. Isabella of course responds in raptures, possibly before she even gets Miss Tilney a hundred percent in focus:
“What a delightful girl! I never saw anything half so beautiful! But where is her all-conquering brother? Is he in the room? Point him out to me this instant, if he is. I die to see him. Mr. Morland, you are not to listen. We are not talking about you.”
“But what is all this whispering about? What is going on?”
“There now, I knew how it would be. You men have such restless curiosity! Talk of the curiosity of women, indeed! ‘Tis nothing. But be satisfied, for you are not to know anything at all of the matter.”
“And is that likely to satisfy me, do you think?”
“Well, I declare I never knew anything like you. What can it signify to you, what we are talking of? Perhaps we are talking about you; therefore I would advise you not to listen, or you may happen to hear something not very agreeable.”
In this commonplace chatter, which lasted some time, the original subject seemed entirely forgotten…
And before you know it, the band starts up again, and Isabella laments to Catherine about “what your brother wants me to do. He wants me to dance with him again, though I tell him that it is a most improper thing…It would make us the talk of the place, if we were not to change partners.” Of course, if James did try to change partners, she’d club him unconscious, drag him onto the floor by his hair, and flounce around to the music while holding him up at the armpits.
Meantime, John Thorpe has wandered away again—possibly to corner some unsuspecting squire and dare him to guess how many goats he can lift over his head—leaving Isabella free to accept an invitation from Mr. Tilney. She dashes back to catch him…but too late; he’s already partnering someone else. Mrs. Allen makes it even worse by telling her that Tilney had in fact been dying to dance, and would’ve asked her if she’d been around.
Then that dance ends and John Thorpe reappears, saying, “Well, Miss Morland, I suppose you and I are to stand up and jig it together again.” Catherine somehow manages to withstand this tremendous gallantry, and tells him she’s too tired to dance again—though of course she really just wants to be available for Mr. Tilney. But John takes a hint about as well as he takes anything that doesn’t actually does drop from a second-storey window onto his head, and offers an alternative plan.
“Then let us walk about and quiz people. Come along with me, and I will show you the four greatest quizzers in the room; my two sisters and their partners. I have been laughing at them this half hour.”
Catherine finally wards him off—possibly with the help of a restraining order—but it doesn’t do her any goddamn good.
The rest of the evening was very dull; Mr. Tilney was drawn away from their party, to attend that of his partner; Miss Tilney, though belonging to it, did not sit near her, and James and Isabella were so much engaged in conversing together that the latter had no leisure to bestow more on her friend than one smile, one squeeze, and one “dearest Catherine.”
“Dearest Catherine” is basically batting .000, and I feel almost guilty laughing about it. It’s not like when Fate dumped a load of manure over Fanny Price’s head; that was funny because Fanny’s dogged passivity invited it. Catherine is far from passive; it’s just that her judgment is so hilariously, unremittingly lousy.
And you know what?...It’s not going to change anytime soon. So we may as well sit back and enjoy watching her trip over her petticoats into ever greater distress. We know it’ll all work out in the end…for her, for Tilney, for pretty much everyone—with the possible exception of Laurentina’s skeleton.

Northanger Abbey, chapters 1-5

In my concluding remarks on Emma—a novel I otherwise regard very fondly—I lamented that it found Austen in lyrical, pastoral mode, rather than her usual urbane, satiric one. No such complaint can be made about Northanger Abbey. From its first pages, it drop-kicks us back to the sensibility of the juvenile Jane Austen, that merry subversive who would’ve booted the entire British empire down a flight of stairs if it made for a good joke.
There is a problem, though; which is that this blog has been devoted to charting Austen’s development as both a novelist and a satirist. Northanger Abbeythrows that plan a curve ball, as it was the first novel that Austen ever completed for publication, though it actually wasn’t published until after her death; and while she put it through another revision in the months prior to her decease, it represents, in any objective sense, the author as she was before Emma, not the one who emerged on the other side of that immortal triple-decker.
Still, it was Austen’s intention that Northanger Abbey (although that wasn’t her title for it) follow Emma, so we’ll have to take it on its own terms. Which are considerable.
In fact, Northanger Abbey is in many ways the most modern of Austen’s works. It is, for instance, entirely unsentimental, sometimes brutally so, in a way that prefigures Austen’s bracingly misanthropic successors (Kingsley Amis, Nancy Mitford, and Evelyn Waugh come immediately to mind). It’s also, I think, one of the earliest examples of metafiction in English literature. Northanger Abbey is a novel about reading novels—ostensibly in defense of the pursuit; though its heroine, Catherine Morland, is by any standard of measure mildly deranged by having read too many of them.
What should be made clear at the outset, however, is that the word “novel” in Northanger Abbey means something different than the associations the word calls forth today. In Austen’s time, the novel was a new literary form and slightly disreputable; its popularity was due in large part to the kinds of works we today would call “gothic”: overwrought tales of innocent virgins, hissing villains, passionate love affairs, dauntless heroes, and mysterious castles with secret chambers. Austen satirizes these works from the very first paragraph, in which she explains to us that her heroine isn’t the kind we’re accustomed finding at the center of a novel; she’s a very ordinary girl living in unremarkable circumstances.
Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings—and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters.
This is so exactly the tone of the juvenile Austen that it’s almost startling; like watching a middle-aged woman turn a cartwheel across the room, for old time’s sake. We’re still reeling from that salvo, when Austen says of Catherine’s mother that she “had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing them into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on”—and we realize, okay, this is where we are now: back in nothing-is-sacred territory.
Austen spends a page or two really heaping it on, not merely about Catherine’s ordinariness, but about really her completeunsuitability for a heroic role of any kind. “She never could learn or understand anything before she was taught, and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid.” She is, we’re told, a washout at music, at drawing, and at French. And yet for all these miserable failures, “at ten years old, she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper,” and her looks actually begin to improve as she enters her teens to the point at which her parents can remark, “Catherine grows quite a good-looking girl—she is almost pretty.”
Her one enthusiasm is for reading; “provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.”
But even at seventeen, which is pretty much the age at which the heroines of such books come into their gory glory, Catherine remains completely unlike them; she has yet even to inspire any local lads to defy death or dishonor for her sake, to leap a barricade or sail on Troy or dare the depths of Hell or whatever. “This was strange indeed!” Austen remarks. “But strange things may be generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out.” And the cause for this one doesn’t take much searching:
There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no—not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door—not one young man whose origin was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no children.
From our point of view, it’s like Austen is impishly giving the Brontë sisters’ titties a twist, thirty years before there’s cause.
So there it is: by both nature and nurture, Catherine isn’t heroine material. Except…here she is, at the center of a novel. So what the hell? Austen, going meta again, explains.
But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.
And what happens is that one Mr. Allen, a landed big-shot in the environs where Catherine has grown up, invites her to accompany him and his wife to Bath—“probably aware that if adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.” So off she goes into the big, bad, dangerous world, filled with wicked men on the make, the kind who don’t consider a day well spent until they’ve ravished a virgin and left her bereft of hope and honor. And before lunch, if at all possible.
Despite this, Catherine’s parents seem able to see her off with relative sangfroid:
Cautions against the violence of such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing young ladies away to some remote farmhouse, must, at such a moment, relieve the fullness of [Catherine’s mother’s] heart. Who would not think so? But Mrs. Morland knew so little of lords and baronets, that she entertained no notion of their general mischievousness…Her cautions were confined to the following points. “I beg, Catherine, you will always wrap yourself up very warm about the throat, when you come from the rooms at night; and I wish you would try to keep some account of the money you spend; I will give you this little book on purpose.”
The travelers’ journey is uneventful. “Neither robbers nor tempests befriended them, nor one lucky overturn to introduce them to the hero. Nothing more alarming than a fear, on Mrs. Allen’s side, of having once left her clogs behind her at an inn, and that fortunately proved to be groundless.” I suppose there must be, somewhere, some sad, sour soul who, reading these chapters, gets tired of the same joke being told over and over again. What can I say, I personally find it hilarious every time. The juxtaposition of the over-the-top genre conventions of the period with the bland realities of Catherine’s life, is just a comedy gold mine…at least in Austen’s nimble hands.
Catherine is suitably awed by the size and bustle of Bath, and settles in with the Allens, looking forward to a happy stay. We’re now given a brief profile of Mrs. Allen, who is, Austen tells us, “one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them. She had neither beauty, genius, accomplishment, nor manner.” What she does have, we soon discover, is style. She’s an unregenerate clotheshorse, with an extensive wardrobe and a husband who can afford to keep it cutting-edge. In fact, Mrs. Allen has to take Catherine’s dress and grooming in hand so that she’s sufficiently fashion-forward to stand beside her when they finally go out into society—a companion being, for her, apparently just another accessory, like a trained monkey, or a chapeau.
On their debut at the principal ballroom, Mr. Allen dashes off to the gambling tables, leaving his wife and Catherine “to enjoy a mob by themselves.” And a mob it certainly is; the two women squeeze themselves through the crowd looking for a place to survey the action, but manage to see “nothing of the dancers but the high feathers of some of the ladies.” At last they find themselves in a passage where the view isn’t quite so impeded, and Catherine feels herself longing to dance, but of course they don’t know anyone in the place who might ask her, and also, getting back to the dance floor at this point would take about a week and a half and probably involve some loss of limb.
Mrs. Allen did all that she could do in such a case by saying very placidly, every now and then, “I wish you could dance, my dear—I wish you could get a partner.” For some time her young friend felt obliged to her for these wishes; but they were repeated so often, and proved so totally ineffectual, that Catherine grew tired at last, and would thank her no more.
The two women drift for a while, like flotsam, eventually arriving in the tea room, where they feel “the awkwardness of having no party to join, no acquaintance to claim, no gentleman to assist them…without having anything to do there, or anybody to speak to, except each other.” But never mind, one of them at least has found a silver lining.
Mrs. Allen congratulated herself, as soon as they were seated, on having preserved her gown from injury. “It would have been very shocking to have it torn,” said she, “would it not? It is such a delicate muslin. For my part I have not seen anything I like so well in the whole room, I assure you.”
Mrs. Allen is shaping up to be an early favorite. Her preoccupation with costume, and costume alone—to the exclusion of family, faith, king, country, and probably health and happiness—mark her as a new and extremely promising type of Jane Austen character. We’ll be watching her as the novel progresses (but not nearly so closely as she’ll be watching herself).
Catherine, however, isn’t quite so worthy of attention, as Austen points out while getting in one more encore of her running joke: “She was seen by many young men…Not one, however, stared with rapturous wonder on beholding her, no whisper of eager inquiry ran around the room, nor was she once called a divinity by anybody.” A couple of strutting dudes do give her passing marks within her hearing, and being a humble sort of kid, that’s enough for her to chalk up the evening as a win.
The next few days pass uneventfully, with Mrs. Allen dragging Catherine all over Bath, where they stand around looking swell but never talking to anybody. “The wish of a numerous acquaintance in Bath was still uppermost with Mrs. Allen, and she repeated it after every fresh proof, which every morning brought, of her knowing nobody at all.” But hey, at least she looks sensational.
Since the novel would pretty much stall out if this situation continued, eventually they’re paired up at a dance with a certain Mr. Tilney. “He seemed to be about four or five and twenty, was rather tall, and had a pleasing countenance, a very intelligent and lively eye, and if not quite handsome, was very near it. His address was good, and Catherine felt herself in high luck.” What’s more, he’s pretty much a gold medalist in small talk, and while they dance he hits Catherine with such a barrage of disarmingly arch nonsense that she almost trips over her own hem.
“I have hitherto been remiss, madam, in the proper attentions of partner here; I have not yet asked you how long you have been in Bath; whether you were ever here before; whether you have been in the Upper Rooms, the theatre, and the concert; and how you like the place altogether. I have been very negligent—but are you now at leisure to satisfy me in these particulars? If you are I will begin directly.”
He then rewinds and asks her every single one of these questions, one right after the other, to which she replies in bleats and squeaks and other barnyard noises, but never mind, it’s really only his own voice he wants to hear anyway.
“Have you been long in Bath, madam?”
“About a week, sir,” replied Catherine, trying not to laugh.
“Really!” with affected astonishment.
“Why should you be surprised, sir?”
“Why, indeed!” said he, in his natural tone. “But some emotion must appear to be raised by your reply, and surprise is more easily assumed, and not less reasonable, than any other. Now let us go on.”
Tilney is, astonishingly, the hero of this novel. Yet clearly, his precursors in Austen’s canon are the smooth-talking sumbitches like Willoughby, Wickham, Henry Crawford, and Frank Churchill. What are we to make of an Austen hero who’s a silver-tongued bon vivant? We certainly know what his predecessors would have made of him. Five minutes in the same room, and Mr. Knightley would want to smash a piano bench over his head.
This is where our chronology problem rears its head. We can’t know for sure whether Austen is deliberately giving us a hero who’s a complete 180 from her previous stalwarts, who were so cloaked in gravitas it’s a wonder they could stand upright, or whether Tilney is just a holdover from Jane’s juvenile period who survived multiple edits. All we know for sure is that, by the self-consciously zany way he talks, he might have stepped out of a Lewis Carroll novel—if Lewis Carroll had written any at this point.
“I see what you think of me,” said he gravely—“I shall make but a poor figure in your journal tomorrow.”
“My journal!”
“Yes, I know exactly what you will say: Friday, went to the Lower Rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings—plain black shoes—appeared to much advantage; but was strangely harassed by a queer, half-witted man, who would make me dance with him, and distressed me by his nonsense.”
“Indeed I shall say no such thing.”
“Shall I tell you what you ought to say?”
“If you please.”
“I danced with a very agreeable young man, introduced by Mr. King; had a great deal of conversation with him—seems a most extraordinary genius—hope I may know more of him. That, madam, is what I wish you to say.”
“But, perhaps, I keep no journal.”
“Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible.”
Did you catch the bit about the sprigged muslin?...Not the kind of detail Austen heroes are accustomed to finding worthy of comment, or even noticing at all. Colonel Brandon could die and be reincarnated six hundred thousand times; he’ll never know muslin from sackcloth. But there’s something epicene about Tilney—today, we’d call him a metrosexual, and that’s only if we gave him the benefit of the doubt. Just listen to him as he boasts of his expertise to Mrs. Allen, who is exactly the sort to be flattened by admiration of it:
“…I always buy my own cravats, and am allowed to be an excellent judge; and my sister has often trusted me in the choice of a gown. I bought one for her the other day, and it was pronounced to be a prodigious bargain by every lady who saw it. I gave but five shillings a yard for it, and a true Indian muslin.”
After a whole evening of this kind of conversation—witty bon mots spiked with an occasional jibe at someone else’s unfortunate dress sense—Catherine departs the assembly “with a strong inclination for continuing the acquaintance.” We twenty-first century types aren’t surprised; what teenage girl doesn’t long for a gay best friend? But this is the nineteenth century, when accepeptable varieties of acquaintance between men and women were fewer than they are today. It was basically cleave-to-and-bear-children, or fuhgeddaboudit. So Catherine’s stuck with actually falling in love with the guy.
Not that she complains. She isn’t an ambitious girl, or a particularly savvy one, points that are driven home about ninety-three times on every page, so falling in love with the first man who speaks to her is just fine, thanks. Couldn’t ask for better. And as we’ll increasingly see, Tilney’s tender feelings for her are pretty much triggered by one thing: her good taste in choosing him. When he looks at her, he might as well be looking in a mirror.
Clearly, we’re a long, long way from Elizabeth and Darcy. But never mind, this is all going to be tremendous fun—trust me. If only because this couple—and this novel—are the biggest rebuke ever to Austen’s reputation as a romantic. Her dewy-eyed dowager fans, fretting over their Earl Grey and therapeutically stroking their seventeen cats, have no idea what to make of it. No. Idea. Nor does anyone else, apparently. Ask yourself: which is the only Austen novel never to be made into a major motion picture? Studios cough up new versions of the other five every few seasons, but Northanger Abbey—whose tone is more Monty Python than Masterpiece Theater—completely defeats them from the get-go.
So, great, we have our hero and our heroine. But Catherine’s pursuit of her man is dealt a serious blow when he suddenly, seemingly, evaporates into thin air. Everywhere she goes she looks for him, and everywhere she goes, she’s disappointed. Which at least allows Mrs. Allen the pleasure of reviving her catchphrase, “How pleasant it would be if we had any acquaintance here.”
But she soon loses even that privilege (maybe she can fall back on “I see no one whose muslin moves me to regret my own”) when she encounters a Mrs. Thorpe, whom she immediately recognizes as an old school chum. “Their joy on this meeting was very great, as well it might, since they had been contented to know nothing of each other for the last fifteen years”; and they fall into “talking both together, far more ready to give than to receive information, and each hearing very little of what the other said.” Who but an unrepentant misanthrope could pen such lines? But wait, there’s more:
Mrs. Thorpe…had one great advantage as a talker, over Mrs. Allen, in a family of children, and when she expatiated on the talents of her sons, and the beauty of her daughters, when she related their different situations and views…Mrs. Allen had no similar information to give, no similar triumphs to press on the unwilling and unbelieving ear of her friend, and was forced to sit and appear to listen to all these maternal effusions, consoling herself, however, with the discovery, which her keen eye soon made, that the lace on Mrs. Thorpe’s pelisse was not half so handsome as that on her own.
Then it occurs—England still being a small country, and enough with the lack of supporting characters already—that Mrs. Thorpe’s daughters have met Catherine’s brother, and they exclaim and clap their hands and cavort around Catherine’s chair in delight over her tremendous resemblance to him. The Miss Thorpes then declare their “wish of being better acquainted with her; of being considered as being already friends, through the friendship of their brothers, etc., which Catherine heard with pleasure”. The eldest of the sisters, whose name is Isabella, asks Catherine to take a turn about the room with her, which pretty much cements them as inseparable besties for the rest of the novel—Catherine being about as discriminating in choosing her closest confidante as she is about the man she adores. In both cases, it’s first come, first served.
Their friendship is actually a pretty equitable one, despite the rather casual way it falls into place, because Isabella’s specialty is talking, and Catherine’s is letting her. Isabella is also four years older, which gives her the experience with which to “compare the balls of Bath with those of Cambridge, its fashions with the fashions of London”, and other vitally important issues which Catherine would probably be too dim to pick up herself even if she were the senior of the pair by four, or ten, or thirty-five years.
Before these two girls run away with the novel (because of course they’re going to; at least, Isabella is, leading Catherine by the hand, no doubt with Catherine looking over her shoulder and asking please, hold up a minute, I think I dropped a glove or something), Austen pauses to give a little back story on Mrs. Thorpe, the gist of which is: widow—not very rich—pleasant—spoils the kids—oldest girl a beauty—the others, meh. None of this is vital stuff or even wildly interesting, till we discover it’s all been the set-up for another of Austen’s satiric jabs at her chosen genre:
This brief account of the family is intended to supersede the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself, of her past adventures and sufferings, which might otherwise be expected to occupy the three or four following chapters; in which the worthlessness of lords and attornies might be set forth, and conversations, which had passed twenty years before, be minutely repeated.
She’s having a whale of a time here, our J.A.
As I noted earlier, Isabella and Catherine are now inseparable. But having what is basically an incessantly talking parrot clamped to her shoulder doesn’t prevent Catherine from looking everywhere for Mr. Tilney. Alas, it’s in vain.
He was nowhere to be met with; every search for him was equally unsuccessful, in morning lounges or evening assemblies; neither in the upper nor lower rooms, at dressed or undressed balls, was he perceivable; nor among the walkers, the horsemen, or the curricle-drivers of the morning. His name was not in the pump-room book, and curiosity could do no more. He must be gone from Bath.
Of course there’s an easy way know for certain whether he’s still in town. Just hire Liza Minnelli to play one of the assemblies. If Tilney doesn’t show for that, he ain’t within crawling distance.
The inexplicableness of his disappearance makes him a figure of mystery to Catherine; and if that’s not sufficient to feed the fires of her crush, there’s Isabella constantly pressing her for details, eager to live vicariously through Catherine’s spectacular new romance.
Isabella was very sure that he must be a charming young man…She liked him the better for being a clergyman, “for she must confess herself very partial to the profession”; and something like a sigh escaped her as she said it. Perhaps Catherine was wrong in not demanding the cause of that gentle emotion—but she was not experienced enough in the finesse of love, or the duties of friendship, to know when delicate raillery was properly called for, or when a confidence should be forced.
It’s just as well. “Delicate raillery” is probably not in her repertoire. You might as well ask her to spew obscenities in Punjabi.
But we get a pretty good clue as to “the cause of that gentle emotion” when we learn, a page or two on, that Isabella and Catherine’s favorite activity is “to shut themselves up, to read novels together.” Which launches Austen into a mini-manifesto on the art form, which has become the single most excerpted section of Northanger Abbey:
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 performances, 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 heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust.
“Alas!” she cries, going meta again. “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.” She later laments that “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.”
“Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”: or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which 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.
Austen is playing a very sophisticated game here. She’s mounted a spirited defense of her chosen art form, and a sound one; but she’s done so in the pages of a novel in which her heroine—who, unlike those other heroines whose snooty derision she scoffs at—is a novel-devouring fanatic, and whose mind is so deranged by this illicit passion that she almost can’t function in the real world. In fact, she’ll ultimately suffer very real consequences for it.
So what is Austen playing at?...My own view is that she’s just exhibiting her own exhilarating, diabolical genius. Jane Austen, issue a tub-thumping pronouncement on the excellence of the novel, in the rhetorically polished phrases of a member of Parliament?...Not without her alter ego—that other Jane Austen—slipping in behind her back to subvert her arguments within her own plot. Austen’s is simply too expansive a mind to chart a course and follow it through, like some dutiful pack horse. She’s compelled to make it interesting for herself.
In the end, of course, it’s this very paradox that prevails. Austen proves her point by disproving it; the fact that we’re here, two hundred years later, still talking about Catherine Morland and Northanger Abbey in a way we don’t talk about, or even remember, Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda, is because of this novel’s complexities—its dissonances—its strangeness and its irreverence, its little bouts of fisticuffs with itself—all of which render it endlessly, agelessly delightful. Yes, in fact a novel is a magnificent thing; but not the kinds of overstuffed Gothic doorstops with which Catherine Morland bloats her brain; rather the kind whose quicksilver flashes of the divine Jane Austen, perhaps alone among her immediate contemporaries, helped to invent. And which no one since has ever done better.
Maybe as well…but never better.

Home News

Ciao, amici!

We're now two-thirds of the way through this project...actually, farther, because Mansfield Park and Emma are Austen's longest novels, and the two remaining (Northanger Abbey and Persuasion) her shortest. So I'm reasonably confident we'll be wrapping up next year. I'm taking a few weeks off for the holidays, but will be back in short order, tanned, fit, and ready to ride this baby as far as she goes.

With that in mind, I'm already prepping the publication of Vol. 2. The cover's designed and ready to roll, and in fact I've redesigned Vol. 1 to make it a matched set. I've also gone back and fixed all the pesky typos that crept into the first edition of Vol. 1. So it makes the perfect Xmas gift for any Austenphile, Janeite, or bitch on your list—whether bonneted or otherwise. (And remember, the ebook version is just 99 cents!)


Finally, there's now a Facebook page for the project. It's called Bitch In a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen (which is all the characters they allowed before they shut me down). That's where I'll be updating y'all with news and tidbits, far more so than I feel is appropriate here...I may even slip in an occasional review (of, say, an Austen mash-up, or a movie adaptation or whatever). So when you get a chance, bop on over to Facebook and slap me down a Like.

Meantime, Happy Thanksgiving—and for our readers across the pond, happy whatever it is you'll be doing this month instead.