3 - Northanger Abbey

Summary

Northanger Abbey is about the seduction of the reader, fictional and real. Since reading may control mental construction and perception, it is the comedy of fiction enriching and deforming the life of a single girl. Samuel Johnson claimed that, in the modern romance or ‘familiar history’, ‘the power of example, is so great, as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will’. The external reader is caught up in the process, for he or she cannot help believing in the novel's events even as the narrator proclaims them fictional. The mind in and outside the novel is inhabited by stories, including the stories implied by habitual language: the only defence against their control is constant scrutiny, not only of works but of the memory into which they have been transmuted. Using the vehicle of a naïve heroine, Northanger Abbey studies the creation of subjectivity through language and its images. Since it is also a novel with a novel's plot, it delivers a satisfactory story in which a sophisticated hero is seduced by sparkling eyes and girlish adoration.

Northanger Abbey had the longest gestation of any Austen work: published posthumously in 1818, it was first drafted in 1798–9, revised in 1803 and prepared for publication in 1816, so inhabiting three historical moments.