My Problem with Northanger Abbey

[bibliogramma]

Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

I’ll say it up front: this is my least favourite of Austen’s novels. I re-read it rarely, in comparison to my favourites, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. It doesn’t call out to me in the way that the others do, reminding me that it’s sitting on my shelves, waiting for me to turn my attention once more to its pages.

But, a few days ago, I was flipping channels and happened upon a film version of the book – one I hadn’t even known existed – and I decided to read it again to see if my feelings about it had changed.

They haven’t.

It’s an enjoyable read, to be sure – it’s hard to imagine not finding something to enjoy in an Austen novel – but I remain unable to connect to Catherine Morland the way I do with the women of Austen’s other novels. Part of it, I think, is that Austen has made too much of a satire of Catherine’s character for me to warm to her. Most of Austen’s other protagonists – Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse, Fanny Price, Anne Elliot – have their weaknesses, flaws and follies, but they also have their strengths. They are strong characters with distinguishing qualities. They are individuals. Catherine Moreland has never seemed to me to emerge from the text as a person in her own right the way Austen’s other protagonists do – the circumstances she finds herself in seem to overwhelm her, and she never seems to be much more than a pretty and somewhat silly girl who loves reading Gothic novels.

All the other elements of the Austen novel are present, and indeed the social satire is stronger here than in some of the other novels, and the skewering of the conventions of the Gothic novel are fine indeed, but without a strong and central protagonist, the rest of it falls just a little flat.