Booked to read . . . my book tracker: Gothic

2nd Completed 19th Century Women Writer
(An Unexpected Addition)
Jane Austen
(1775-1817)

(A Public Domain Image)

Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen
Published posthumously in 1817

(My Purple Cover)

(A More Gothic Cover)

Serendipity! Sidetrack! Surprise!

My Spring Break began with a movie marathon - a DVD movie marathon! One of the titles was “The Jane Austen Book Club“. I am not sure what drew me to this movie, but I was. Maybe it was the phrase book club. At any rate, it is a fun escape movie that gives insight into a group of women (and one man) and their connection to Jane Austen. I enjoyed it, and it renewed my years old resolution to read Jane Austen. As a teenager I read Pride and Prejudice and at the time, being a romantic teenager, I loved it. As I grew older and perhaps more jaded, I turned from romantic themes to my genre of choice - mystery. As I watched the movie, I was immediately drawn to the description of Northanger Abbey and decided, why not? The next day I bought the book, a new edition whose cover is purple - what’s not to love?!? If I had followed the page 69 test, I would never have completed it. But I am nothing if not stubborn and so persisted - to my great delight! By page 107 I was hooked and finished reading the entire novel in one sitting thus experiencing serendipity and being surprised and sidetracked from my original choices for this challenge.

Northanger Abbey can, with a stretch, fit into my obsession with the mystery genre because Austen parodies Gothic Thrillers throughout, especially Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). And the case can be made that Catherine is a strong, independent female protagonist. She is determined to make the truth known to the Tilney family when she is tricked into missing an appointed walk. When she is rudely evicted from the Tilney home by the very autocratic patriarch, she finds her way home alone, never missing a coach connection. Perhaps my favorite example of her strength is Catherine’s dogged desire to explore what she imagines is a forbidden section of the Abbey, the room of the dead mother. Influenced by her love of Gothic novels, Catherine comes to believe that Mrs. Tilney is not deceased, but hidden from the public, imprisoned by General Tilney for nefarious purposes. This certainly brings to mind Jane Eyre which was not published until 1847 and suggests another avenue of research.

My favorite passage of Northanger Abbey is from page 107, the page that kept me reading:

But you never read novels, I dare say?

Why not?

Because they are not clever enough for you - gentlemen read better books.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Abbey is described as a parody of the Gothic novels popular at that time, satirizing that popularity. Austen may have indeed intended that purpose, but her description of Catherine’s fantasy about fitting Northanger Abbey, the estate, into the Gothic mode suggests that she could have written an excellent thriller!

And are you prepared to encounter all the horrors that a building such as 'what one reads about' may produce? Have you a stout heart? Nerves fit for sliding panels and tapestry?" . . . We shall not have to explore our way into a hall dimly lighted by the expiring embers of a wood fire - nor be obliged to spread our beds on the floor of a room without windows, doors, or furniture. But you must be aware that when a young lady is . . . introduced into a dwelling of this kind, she is always lodged apart from the rest of the family . . . 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 a ceremony as this?

In the end, however, Austen has written a story about the rite of passage of a very young girl, a young girl who in the space of a year recognizes that she has been foolish in letting her imagination run away with her but not foolish in her estimate of the worth of Henry Tilney.

She did not learn either to forget or defend the past; but she learned to hope that it would never transpire farther, and that it might not cost her Henry's entire regard. . . . Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to looked for.

I am not sure that I entirely agree with Austen here. I choose to believe that this is another instance of her irony, saying one thing but meaning another, because I do believe that readers of mysteries and of thrillers can learn about human nature.