Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen’s Gothic Parody

Writer of classics such as Pride and Prejudice and Emma, Jane Austen is one of the most enduring authors in history. Of her six novels, some were instant successes and have maintained their popularity and literary value through the centuries. Others, like Northanger Abbey, were met with more confusion than enthusiasm. As a coming-of-age romance and a romantic satire, a gothic parody and a comedy of manners, Northanger Abbey has confounded—and often been dismissed by—audiences and critics since its publication. But is Austen’s genre-shifting book so easily dismissible?

Northanger Abbey was among the last of Jane Austen’s novels to be published, but one of, if not the very first, to be written. The book chronicles a summer in the life of young Catherine Morland, a naïve, imaginative seventeen-year-old girl obsessed with Gothic romances, who is going on her first trip away from home. We follow Catherine to the bustling Bath and the (probably) sinister Northanger Abbey, as she makes her way—often stumbling—into adult life and the social realities of it.

Northanger Abbey was published in a double edition with Persuasion in 1818, shortly after Austen’s death. However, the first manuscript of Abbey, was written as early as 1798, and sent to publication in 1803. This gap between writing and publication is acknowledged in the foreword of the first edition, where Jane Austen writes:

“This little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication. It was disposed of to a bookseller, it was even advertised, and why the business proceeded no farther, the author has never been able to learn. That any bookseller should think it worthwhile to purchase what he did not think it worthwhile to publish seems extraordinary. […] The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes.”

The Horrid Publication Mysteries of Northanger Abbey

The reason for this unusual publication history is, fittingly, and as Austen makes clear in the novel’s preface, an extraordinary mystery. According to her sister, Cassandra Austen, Jane started working on the novel, then titled Susan, around 1797-99, following a trip of her own to Bath. Some speculate it might have been even earlier than that, overlapping with Austen’s Juvenilia phase, around 1794.

The facts we know of are thus: In 1803 Susan was sold for ten pounds to Benjamin Crosby & Co. publishing, intended for immediate publication. On at least one occasion Susan was advertised by Crosby & Co. as one of their upcoming titles, alongside a series of other Gothic novels like Catherine’s favored The Mysteries of Udolpho. For reasons that remain obscure, however, by the next month, Susan had been dropped from the publication list. Some speculate that Benjamin Crosby’s money issues were behind the cut.

After six years with no publication or explanation, in 1809 Jane Austen sent Crosby a letter questioning the publishing house and arguably threatening to publish it herself. The letter was signed by Ms. Ashton Dennis—M.A.D. Unswayed, Crosby responded that they owned Susan’s intellectual property regardless of publication, that they’d sue if anyone else tried to publish it, and that if M.A.D. wanted her manuscript back she would need to buy it back for the original 10 pounds.

Austen would end up doing just that, in 1816. At the time Jane was finishing her novel Persuasion; Even so, with her manuscript back in possession, Austen put it through an unknown number of revisions. The title was changed to Catherine, and parts of the novel were rewritten and reworked.

The extension of the revisions and whether Jane was considering publishing it soon is another mystery. In a letter to her niece, in early 1817 Jane wrote: “Miss Catherine is put upon the shelf for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out.” Jane Austen would die a few months later, leaving her writing rights to her sister Cassandra. In early 1818 the Susan/Catherine novel was finally published, now with the moody, fittingly gothic name Northanger Abbey. Why the titling changed and who did it is another unsolved detail of its history.

Much speculation surrounds the twisting story of Northanger Abbey’s publication. The themes and tonal shifts of the novel have had mixed reactions, with many pointing to its haphazard publication history as a reason why this satire reads so differently from the rest of Austen’s body of work. But does it really?

As we have seen, Northanger Abbey follows a formative summer in the life of young Catherine Morland. The first pages establish all the ways in which Catherine is not a heroine, least of all a romantic, let alone a gothic one. Catherine has no outstanding qualities, prefers rolling in the grass to dolls, and, most egregiously, she had an unremarkable, happy childhood with parents who loved her.

In her life comes the typical disruption necessary to send her on a heroine’s journey, in the form of a trip to bustling Bath. Catherine is innocent, awkward, and naïve, but also good-natured and principled.

In Bath, Catherine meets and instantly strikes a friendship with Isabella Thorpe. They bond over their love of horrid and shocking gothic novels, and Isabella leads Catherine into various social engagements. Isabella is charismatic and effusive but can be shrewd and manipulative. These are traits she shares with her brother, John Thorpe, who takes an interest in Catherine.

To round up the cast we have the Tilney family. Residents of the titular Northanger Abbey, the Tilney’s are a wealthy, respectable family, with perhaps something more than meets the eye. The patriarch is General Tilney, a severe, demanding man whose apparent kindness towards Catherine can’t dispel the oppressive aura he seems to carry.

The Tilney siblings are three. Captain Frederick Tilney, the eldest, is something of a cad. The youngest, Eleanor, is a sweet, bright woman and Henry, the middle child, is a nearly handsome, intelligent, talkative, and witty clergyman. He also happens to be our main love interest.

When Jane Austen died at just 41 years old, she left among her work the Juvenilia, her childhood writings. These have an exuberant, near absurdist style that satirized daily life in ways much more boisterous and unsubtle than the author’s mature work, and an anarchical approach to narrative that some have likened to post-modernist literature.

The Juvenilia has often been dismissed as amusing but trifling. It is not so surprising then, that Northanger Abbey has been singled out as Austen’s novel that most resembles her youth writings. Northanger Abbey plays with genre and convention with a direct boldness that sets it apart from Austen’s other books. It is a sweet coming-of-age novel, a gothic adventure, and a romance. It is also a parody of all of those genres and a defense of them. It deploys a slight anarchy of structure and tone, and whether it is well or clumsily deployed is a matter of much debate.

Austen uses the framing of Catherine’s introduction to Bath to mercilessly poke fun at social conventions, largely from the mouth of the opinionated Henry Tilney. With far more gentleness, it also pokes fun at Catherine’s cluelessness, her romanticized view of the world, and her shortcomings as a heroine. At the same time, as she matures out of teenhood and experiences betrayal and heartbreak, Catherine’s unromantic nature highlights her strength of character and agency.

As Austen’s only direct parody, Northanger Abbey’s comedy is bolder and more absurd than the author’s famously sharp wit. Nothing is safe: Austen satirizes the dramatics of romance as well as the idiosyncrasies of real life, and even fiction and satire themselves. Catherine’s delusions of Gothic horror are undercut with humorous mundanity, yet the happy ending is savvily self-aware of its unrealistic nature. The structure of it is built around the expectations of the genres it contains.

Even the narration is a fourth-wall-breaking deviation. The author regularly points out contradictions in the text, and issues opinions directly to the reader. This can be seen in the famous defense of the novel passage, where Austen takes a break from storytelling to passionately defend novels and novelists derided by society, point out the sexism in its criticism, and subtly call to action fellow novelists to defend theirs as well.

In the vein of the defense of the novel, some of the narrative choices in Northanger Abbey turn out to be the closest manifestations of social justice in Austen’s career. In Abbey, Austen expounds on the inequality between novelists and writers, the judgment of society upon the habits of women, and places the vulnerability women suffered by social and economic entrapments at the heart of the novel.

It is established early on that Catherine Morland (and Isabella Thorne, and Henry and Eleanor Tilney) adore horrid gothic romances. The list of gothic novels Isabella and Catherine read features many real gothic romances popular in the 1790s, most prominently The Mysteries of Udolpho. In fact, if Austen’s passionate defense of novels wasn’t enough, the obscurity of some mentioned titles proves that Austen, the gothic satirist, was herself a fan of the gothic novels.

The story of Northanger Abbey is divided into two parts: the Bath section and the Northanger Abbey section which covers parts where Catherine is invited by General Tilney to spend some time in the family estate. Catherine is ecstatic to spend more time with Henry and Eleanor, and even more excited it is an abbey, in all its potential gothic, horrid glory, and it is there the gothic parody is taken up a few notches. At the abbey, with its dramatic atmosphere and General Tilney’s oppressive presence, Catherine runs wilder than ever. Growing anxieties over the possibility that the General keeps his wife locked up culminate in Catherine being chastised by Henry on the foolishness of her overactive imagination.

The fever pitch of Catherine’s delusions is a concluding piece that compliments and ups the ante of that game of gothic expectation and mundane reality that Austen plays with throughout the book. The breathless stormy nights in the Abbey work as the inverse of Bath scenes when the Thorpes attempt to gaslight and mislead Catherine away from the Tilneys, or Catherine tries to explain her actions to Henry and Eleanor.

Though they are petty affairs, those scenes play out with tension and angst befitting the best gothic romances. The ultimate example of this is, again, General Tilney. Upon learning Catherine has no rank or money, he immediately casts her out, without a thought for propriety or even her safety. Though Catherine was wrong about any wife-in-the-attic accounts, in the end, Catherine had “[…] scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.” The gothic parody of Northanger Abbey hinges not just on comic lampooning, but on the parallels between those extraordinary gothic horrors and the mundane horrors of everyday greed, falsehood, and self-interest—and those, Jane Austen would devote the rest of her life’s work to investigate.