Austen has no patience for the suggestible readers who see the novel as any kind of blueprint for living.
At its heart, Northanger Abbey is a satire that takes apart the conventions of the gothic horror stories and exposes their ridiculous characters, their improbable narratives and their failure to reflect the lives of their readers in any significant particular. And in this book she seizes the chance to poke fun at a whole sub-genre of her contemporaries – the gothic horror novel. It’s a Regency rant that wouldn’t be out of place in a twenty-first century blog – sharp and sarcastic she skewers those who have no time for novels or their creators.īut that doesn’t mean she’s blind to the deficiencies of some novelists. She points the finger at critics who despise the works that give pleasure to so many readers. She upbraids other authors for not standing up for themselves and giving their heroines only ‘improving’ books to read and not ‘frivolous’ novels. She takes sideswipes at those who claim fiction is a waste of time. Northanger Abbey is the novel where Austen tells us what she really thinks about her fellow fiction writers, with all of the wit she had in her arsenal. But unlike them, it goes beyond that to take a shrewd and unsparing look at the role fiction plays in our lives. Like the other five, it has at its heart a love story shaped by the conventions of the time. It is probably the least conventional of Jane Austen’s six published novels – and that suited me well since I’m not what you’d call a conventional romantic novelist! It’s also the least well known, which always surprises me because in some respects, it’s much closer to the novels we read now than Jane Austen’s other works.
In that respect, I totally got Catherine Morland. In fact I spent my teens doing the very same thing, injecting myself into the plots of novels I was reading, because my own daily grind was infinitely duller by comparison. And the second thing was that I utterly understood that you could, like Catherine, lose yourself so thoroughly in a book that it assumed a heightened reality that was much more interesting than life itself. Firstly I felt some impatience with Austen’s position that a woman needed to define herself in terms of her relationship to a man. And I remember two major things about that. I was seventeen – the same age as Northanger Abbey’s young heroine Catherine Morland, though naturally I considered myself far more mature and worldly than she is. The first time I read Northanger Abbey I was an undergraduate at Oxford studying the early development of the English novel.
0 kommentar(er)
