Flashback Friday: Jane Austen, "Northanger Abbey".

A wonderfully entertaining coming-of-age story, Northanger Abbey is often referred to as Jane Austen’s “Gothic parody.” Decrepit castles, locked rooms, mysterious chests, cryptic notes, and tyrannical fathers give the story an uncanny air, but one with a decidedly satirical twist.

The story’s unlikely heroine is Catherine Morland, a remarkably innocent seventeen-year-old woman from a country parsonage. While spending a few weeks in Bath with a family friend, Catherine meets and falls in love with Henry Tilney, who invites her to visit his family estate, Northanger Abbey. Once there, Catherine, a great reader of Gothic thrillers, lets the shadowy atmosphere of the old mansion fill her mind with terrible suspicions. What is the mystery surrounding the death of Henry’s mother? Is the family concealing a terrible secret within the elegant rooms of the Abbey? Can she trust Henry, or is he part of an evil conspiracy? Catherine finds dreadful portents in the most prosaic events, until Henry persuades her to see the peril in confusing life with art.

Executed with high-spirited gusto, Northanger Abbey is the most lighthearted of Jane Austen’s novels, yet at its core this delightful novel is a serious, unsentimental commentary on love and marriage.

So I've decided to do a series of 'flashback friday' style reviews, where I waffle on about some not so recent books. There is nothing better than rediscovering an old favourite, or maybe you'll see something that you've never thought to pick up. This week, we're kicking it super old school: we're doing Austen.

Written first, yet published last, Northerner Abbey is by far my favourite Austen novel that I have read so far. It is, perhaps surprisingly, an immensely funny novel. I know I wasn't expecting it. This admission may horrify many, but I have just never been swept away by Pride and Prejudice. From our dumb bunny heroine, Catherine, to a mean girl that rivals the bitchiness of the one and only Regina George, this novel has a lot more to offer a contemporary audience than many of Austen's other novels. I'm not even exaggerating; Isabella and her manipulating brother had me ready to flip a table at one point.

Austen's narrator is incredibly witty, peppering her observations with large amounts of sass. This novel explores the legitimacy of the novel as a literary form, and in doing so comments on gender ideologies and patriarchal society (In a fun way?). Much of the discourse feels like it may be a private joke between Austen and her reader; the entire time I was reading I could picture a young Austen hunched over her writing desk, tongue in cheek, giggling as she scribbled her story.

“It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language”.


For all those who have dabbled in Austen and found it not for them, I urge you to give this a read. This fun and witty offering will not disappoint.

I'm probably biased, but I give this novel 5 out of 5 stars.