Northanger Abbey: The Danger Was in the Drawing Room

A review of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

By H.R. Zimmerer

Spoiler warning: This review discusses the complete novel and its ending.

Catherine Morland is delighted by the possibility of a mystery.

Unfortunately for her dignity, an old cabinet is considerably more likely to contain household papers than evidence of a crime.

I love Austen in this mood. Northanger Abbey is playful, knowing, and perfectly willing to interrupt its own story to tease the conventions of storytelling. It sends an inexperienced reader of Gothic novels into society, where she looks for danger in the wrong places and overlooks several people who deserve much closer attention.

The joke is affectionate, but it has teeth.

Catherine goes to Bath with Mr and Mrs Allen and enters a social world whose rules she has not yet learned. She befriends Isabella Thorpe, meets Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor, and endures the attentions of Isabella’s brother, John.

THE BOOK

Northanger Abbey

Author
Jane Austen

First publication
1817, posthumously (title page dated 1818)

Rating
5/5

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John is a marvellous example of a man whose opinion of himself has survived almost entirely without assistance from reality.

He boasts, misleads, and assumes that Catherine’s wishes can be altered to suit his convenience. When she wants to keep an engagement with the Tilneys, he treats the obstacle as something to talk around rather than a decision to respect.

The danger is already present, though it does not resemble anything from her favourite novels.

Isabella is harder for Catherine to recognise. Their friendship begins with shared reading, confidences, and apparent devotion. Isabella talks beautifully about affection. Her conduct becomes less convincing when Catherine’s brother, James, cannot offer the fortune she expects, and Captain Frederick Tilney supplies a more exciting possibility.

James’s engagement to Isabella collapses, Frederick does not marry her, and Isabella attempts to recover Catherine’s assistance through a letter whose evasions are far more revealing than she intends.

By then, Catherine has acquired enough experience to read it properly.

That is the education at the heart of the novel. She begins by assuming that other people speak with much the same sincerity she does. Their declared feelings seem trustworthy because she has not yet learned how conveniently language can be arranged.

Henry’s appeal is partly that he makes conversation enjoyable without demanding that Catherine pretend to know more than she does. His humour occasionally has a condescending edge, but he is also a reader of novels, an attentive observer, and a man capable of finding her company genuinely pleasing.

The novel itself is delightfully impatient with people who dismiss fiction as an inferior occupation. Austen can mock Catherine’s conclusions without accepting that her reading makes her contemptible. The mistake lies in how she applies what she reads.

At Northanger Abbey, Catherine’s imagination finds an irresistible setting. She investigates a cabinet, becomes preoccupied with the late Mrs Tilney, and begins to suspect that General Tilney may have concealed something dreadful about his wife’s death.

Henry discovers the direction of her thoughts and corrects her. Catherine’s humiliation is painful because we know how little malice lay behind the fantasy. Curiosity and excitement have carried her into a serious accusation she has no evidence to support.

It would be easy for the novel to end its lesson there: sensible young woman abandons foolish suspicions and learns that respectable houses contain respectable people.

Austen has a much better ending in reserve.

The General abruptly expels Catherine from the abbey, requiring her to travel home alone. His hospitality has depended on his belief that she is wealthy. John Thorpe has first exaggerated her prospects, then supplied a very different account when his own vanity is wounded.

Catherine has committed no offence beyond possessing less money than the General expected.

She was wrong about the form his cruelty would take.

That does not make his cruelty imaginary.

I find the reversal particularly satisfying because it complicates Henry’s earlier correction. Catherine certainly needed to abandon her fantasies of murder. She also needed to learn that a man could live in a handsome house, enjoy a position of authority, and behave disgracefully without committing a Gothic crime.

The journey home strips her adventure of its grandeur. She returns to a family that cannot immediately understand her distress, while her mother worries that impressive acquaintances have made ordinary life unsatisfactory.

Henry’s arrival provides the explanation and reassurance Catherine has been unable to give herself. He disapproves of his father’s conduct, follows her to Fullerton, and asks her to marry him without first securing the General’s consent.

That willingness to act matters more than any clever conversation.

Austen even refuses to make the origin of his attachment impossibly elevated. His interest began partly because he recognised Catherine’s interest in him. The narrator admits it with the cheerful implication that real life is often less majestic than a romance would prefer.

The General eventually relents, helped by Eleanor’s advantageous marriage and a more accurate account of Catherine’s family circumstances. His consent need not be mistaken for a thorough improvement in his character.

Catherine gets her happy ending without everybody else becoming worthy of it.

What I love most is that she does not have to become cynical. Her understanding improves; her capacity for delight survives. She can enjoy a story, fall in love, and believe in people with rather better reasons than she possessed at the beginning.

Northanger Abbey makes me laugh, but it also asks a sharp question about respectability.

Catherine is mortified to have imagined a villain where there was an ordinary gentleman.

The gentleman then behaves abominably, and appears much less troubled by the matter.

Read the primary text of Northanger Abbey