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Northanger Abbey / Lady Susan / Sanditon / The Watsons (1998)

por Jane Austen

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1,324814,195 (4.01)9
'...in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.'Northanger Abbey is about the misadventures of Catherine Morland, young, ingenuous, and mettlesome, and an indefatigable reader of gothic novels. Their romantic excess and dark overstatement feed her imagination, as tyrannical fathers and diabolical villains work their evil on forlorn heroines inisolated settings. What could be more remote from the uneventful securities of life in the midland counties of England? Yet as Austen brilliantly contrasts fiction with reality, ordinary life takes a more sinister turn, and edginess and circumspection are reaffirmed alongside comedy and literaryburlesque.Also including Austen's other short fictions, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, this valuable new edition examines the ambitious and innovative works with which she inaugurated as well as closed her career.… (mais)
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"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid."

Northanger Abbey follows the fortunes of Catherine Morland who spends the 'season' in Bath with family friends. Catherine is an avid reader of novels and has a vivid imagination. This is an important point because Catherine frequently jumps to conclusions which luckily she usually keeps to herself. For example, she believes that one character has murdered his wife by neglect and takes it upon herself to investigate. Whilst on another occasion, Catherine's love interest, Henry Tilney, weaves a story of intrigue involving a dark cabinet with a secret map within the bed chamber in which she is to stay when she visits the eponymous abbey. This she unlocks and explores late at night to find what she believes to be a long forgotten scroll but in the light of day turns out to be a roll of discarded laundry lists.

Throughout the book there are many references to Gothic novels and Austen constantly pokes fun at the excesses of this kind of literature but she also features some of the moral, philosophical and social issues of the day regarding young women looking for love and ultimately marriage.

Catherine is warm and guileless so when she is befriended by the Thorpes she is blind to their faults. Isabella is self-obsessed and constantly lying whilst her brother is a self-serving braggart, both are on the lookout for a financially beneficial marriage proposal.

Included within this book is also the short story Lady Susan, and the unfinished stories The Watsons and Sandition. Lady Susan is written in the form of letters, the eponymous character is manipulative and totally outrageous and I must admit that I loved her. In contrast the two unfinished stories give an insight into the author's thought process but held little interest to me.

Likes most books written during this era it is peppered with words that are no longer in regular use and have longer sentences which all takes a little to get used to, but once you settle into the cadence of the speech things tend to go smoothly.

Overall, there is little action throughout and I found it an OK read rather than a gripping one. ( )
  PilgrimJess | Sep 2, 2020 |
I found this to be a delightful read. Northanger Abbey had me laughing out loud, and I enjoyed the epistolary Lady Susan (so nasty!). I was unprepared for the last two to be incomplete, though - I think I would have enjoyed The Watsons very much. I didn't read much of Sanditon once I realized I wouldn't have the whole thing.

This collection shows a breadth of skill and voice for Austen, though her themes are generally the same. I particularly liked Henry in Northanger Abbey; he was much nicer than Mr. Darcy! ( )
  glade1 | Nov 7, 2017 |
I love Northanger Abbey. It is my favorite Jane Austen. Over the years, my interpretation of Henry Tilney changes. One time romantic and darling; another time cynical and condescending; still another, possibly sociopathic? I mean, we know they marry, but is it happily ever after? In a twisted, but I think not entirely out of character alternative, Henry is really a monster misanthrope who takes in this naive and sweet young woman only to break her spirit. But really, I prefer that he is essentially sweet-natured, if a little disappointed in the stiff, societal roles that all must play; and that adorable Catherine restores his good nature whenever tiresome people degrade it. Yes, that's much better.

Lady Susan is outrageous! She's a monster, truly. I was glad that it was such a short story otherwise I couldn't have taken much more of her. Pernicious, malignant woman!

I really liked where The Watsons was going. I could see it fleshed out into another excellent full-length novel. I was sad to see it end abruptly and unfinished.

Sanditon was a "rough" rough draft and I wasn't feeling it. I abandoned the story. ( )
1 vote libbromus | Nov 25, 2015 |
“Blaize Castle!” cried Catherine; “what is that?”
“The finest place in England – worth going fifty miles at any time to see.”
“What, is it really a castle, an old castle?”
“The oldest in the kingdom.”
“But is it like what one reads of?”
“Exactly – the very same.”
“But now really – are there towers and long galleries?”
“By dozens.”

The irony of this dialogue between the imaginative young ingénue Catherine and her would-be suitor, the boorish John Thorpe, is that Blaise Castle is neither the oldest castle in the kingdom (it was only built in 1766) nor are there dozens of towers and galleries (the three-cornered folly has only three towers and two floors). To these two themes of irony and ingenuousness are added the twin essences of parody and pastiche to furnish the reader of this Austen novel with gothic contrasts and dualities galore.

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: a Gothic story is regarded as the original ‘gothick’ horror tale; first published in 1764, it now seems rather tame and rambling with its over-the-top supernatural happenings (particularly the appearance of a giant flying helmet), its convoluted über-melodramatic plot and its unengaging characters. But it set off a trend for similar novels featuring creepy castles, hidden chambers, darkened passages, villainous father figures, fainting heroines and secrets waiting to be revealed; in fact, precisely the kind of novels that were eventually to be lovingly sent up by Northanger Abbey.

Before embarking on a discussion of this novel it’s worth our while to consider the titles of Jane Austen novels and the three main groups they neatly fall into. The first is a group typified by abstractions: titles such as Persuasion and the two with alliterative pairings, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice. (The latter of course was originally called First Impressions and then apparently re-named following publication of another novel with the same title.) The second group takes on the names of personages, Emma, for example, or Elinor and Marianne (as the first draft of Sense and Sensibility was called) or Susan, which was later revised as Catherine due to the appearance of another novel of the same name, and published posthumously as Northanger Abbey.

And then we have the group which reflects significant place-names, most famously Mansfield Park and, of course, Northanger Abbey (which, as noted above, Austen originally intended to be published as Catherine).

The chief reasons for changes of name are either another novel pre-empting the title or a posthumous re-naming by Austen’s family. In the case of Northanger Abbey we can see that it began life as Susan, then was revised so that the young heroine was re-named Catherine, and finally published after Austen’s death under the title we know today. It’s worth noting this evolution to gain an inkling of how Northanger Abbey is sometimes misjudged for what it is not rather than what it is. Can we judge a book by its cover or can the title misdirect us? I suspect the name change, plus the frequently cited label ‘Gothic parody’, has led many readers (me included) to expect a full-blown melodrama, only to be disappointed; whereas in truth it appears to be another take on Austen’s usual comedy of manners.

The plot concerns a young ingénue, Catherine Morland, who leaves her home in Wiltshire with the older Allens as chaperones to spend time in Bath, then a popular venue for English society. Gauche at first, she meets first the Thorpe family and then the Tilneys, becoming friends with her contemporary Isabella Thorpe and then enamoured of Henry Tilney. Partly to escape the tedium of the Bath season, partly because of her partiality to gothic novels, she accepts an invitation to the Tilney home of Northanger Abbey in Gloucestershire, believing it to be the very stuff of romance. Once there she falls victim to her overheated imagination before the modern world intrudes, at first painfully, and then with an Austen-esque happy ending. The novelist Joan Aiken suggested (in Persuasions, the journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America) that the plot of Northanger Abbey is, as conceived at the close of the 18th century, “much less complex than any of the three later novels. There is a simple chain of events: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.” Aiken gamely speculated on how Jane may have later tried to revise the narrative before finding herself defeated, but mostly we will have to make do with what we find.

However, the apparent simplicity of the plot is for us made more confusing by the fact that we don’t get to the much vaunted abbey till well after the second half of the novel (Volume II as it was first published) has started. The first volume of Northanger Abbey is largely set in Bath (the city, incidentally, where Jane’s parents were married) and reflects the fashionable streets and meeting places that can still be seen today, two centuries and more later. Jane Austen produced, we're told, her first draft of Susan somewhere between 1798 and 1799, at a time when she apparently first visited Bath. The social events and rituals that the young Catherine Morland takes part in will have been based on Jane’s own experiences in her early twenties, long before the Austens’ residency in Bath in 1801 to 1806, during which Susan was revised and placed with a publisher. The second volume, however, is set in a fictional country house, where perhaps we as much as the first readers (let alone Catherine) are led to expect dark goings-on.

As her own Advertisement in Northanger Abbey makes clear, “this little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication”. We don’t know why the bookseller never did issue it, but Austen apologises that her treatment of “places, manners, books, and opinions” are now, thirteen years later, “comparatively obsolete”. (As it was, Northanger Abbey was published, not in 1816, but after her death at the tail end of 1817.) However, the public’s appetite for gothick horror hadn’t actually disappeared: 1818 was to see the appearance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein followed by Polidori’s The Vampyre a year later. So, if we don’t get to visit Northanger Abbey till the second volume, why did Jane’s family not publish the novel as Catherine, her own choice? Did Catherine sound a bit tame as a title? Were they trying to, as it were, cash in on the public’s taste for the supernatural? Or was this Jane’s own ironic choice? Did she see a place-name title such as Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto or Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho as a magnet to draw in a readership that today might be attracted to teenage vampire romances or zombie horror stories? Did it suggest, to quote a frisson-filled Catherine Morland, something horrid?

I mentioned that Northanger Abbey is a novel of dualities: two titles (if we discount the earlier Susan); two main settings, one real, one imaginary; two suitors, one boorish, one heroic; two female friends, one false and one steadfast; two views of the owner of Northanger Abbey, one mistakenly as a murderer in the best Gothick tradition, the other more truly as an ungentlemanly father seeking status in the profitable marriage of his eligible son. There is also the contrast between what is plausible reality and what is romantic fantasy, though of course the novel, as is the way with all metafiction (my favourite word at present), is fantasy, pure and simple.

Is this truly parody? The attempt by Isabelle and John Thorpe to force Catherine into a carriage to drive to Blaize Castle certainly borders on parody, echoing the frequent abductions in gothick literature. Catherine’s imaginings of the father of the honourable Henry as a wicked murderer, though as it turns out he is merely pecuniary, seems more like pastiche. Does Northanger Abbey celebrate rather than mock the work it imitates? I confess I’m in two minds about it. Referential but not reverential is how I prefer to think of it in relation to the standards of the genre.

Since we’re stuck with the novel’s title we now have, let’s consider how Austen means us to picture the Abbey. Is it like the imposing residential folly built by William Beckford, Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire? Or a more modest but still impressive remodelling as at Lacock Abbey in the same county? It may be, as with the misdirection Austen gives in her description of Blaize Castle, that like Catherine we may be imagining the towering edifice of Fonthill, while the reality is that we should be expecting the more edifying Lacock. Either way, Northanger Abbey is a witty subversion of many of our expectations while, conversely, giving us much of what we hope from an Austen novel.

http://wp.me/p2oNj1-or ( )
1 vote ed.pendragon | Jun 15, 2013 |
This is not the best Austen, you can tell it is an early work. The characters are rather one-dimensional, the storyline thin. The wonderful portrayal of society and of relationships that we have come to expect from her later works, is lacking: the critical eye is already there, but there is very little compassion for human frailty. The satirical voice of the narrator does not seem to come naturally, and the characters remain cardboard figures. Still, if you like Austen, it is no hardship to finish this one. ( )
  mojacobs | Feb 15, 2011 |
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'...in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.'Northanger Abbey is about the misadventures of Catherine Morland, young, ingenuous, and mettlesome, and an indefatigable reader of gothic novels. Their romantic excess and dark overstatement feed her imagination, as tyrannical fathers and diabolical villains work their evil on forlorn heroines inisolated settings. What could be more remote from the uneventful securities of life in the midland counties of England? Yet as Austen brilliantly contrasts fiction with reality, ordinary life takes a more sinister turn, and edginess and circumspection are reaffirmed alongside comedy and literaryburlesque.Also including Austen's other short fictions, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, this valuable new edition examines the ambitious and innovative works with which she inaugurated as well as closed her career.

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