Analysis of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 12, 2025

Jane Austen had begun writing her final book, Northanger Abbey, in 1798. It was accepted by a publisher in 1803 but would not be published until 1818, one year following her death. The book was a satire on the wildly popular Gothic genre, particularly works by Ann Radcliffe. However, by the time it appeared, others written with the same purpose in mind had already been published, including Romance Readers and Romance Writers (1810) by Sarah Green and The Heroine, or Adventures of Cherubina (1813) by Eaton Stannard Barrett.

In Austen’s novel, the protagonist, Catherine Morland, travels to Bath, an area Austen knew well, to spend the social season with Mr. and Mrs. Allen as their houseguest. She meets General Tilney and falls in love with his son, Henry, while becoming friends with his daughter, Eleanor. They invite Catherine to visit their home, Northanger Abbey. A fan of the Gothic genre, Catherine’s imagination runs wild, envisioning what she’ll discover in the abbey. However, she’s disappointed, finding large windowpanes, “so clear, so light! To an imagination which had hoped for the smallest divisions and the heaviest stone work, for painted glass, dirt, and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing.” She projects her fears onto the general, whom she comes to believe is engaged in many secret activities, including having murdered his wife, who died nine years previously. When she sees the general pacing the room at night, she thinks, “What could more plainly speak the gloomy workings of a mind not wholly dead to every sense of humanity, in its fearful review of past scenes of guilt! Unhappy man!”

In an embarrassing scene, Catherine is proven wrong by Henry, who asks, “What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding… Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?” Catherine leaves at the suggestion of the general, who believes her to be a fortune hunter. When Henry catches up with Catherine, he explains that his father had made a faulty assumption about her, as she had him, believing her to be poor. Once the general understood that not to be true, he agrees to their romance. Then “the event which it authorized soon followed: Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang and everybody smiled; and… it will not appear, after all the dreadful delays occasioned by the general’s cruelty, that they were essentially hurt by it.”

Critics comment on the novel’s skillful narrative, but also on its lack of subtlety, a necessary component in an imitative style, and its vulgar caricatures, in the vein of novels by Fanny Burney. While not as popular as Austen’s earlier works, Northanger Abbey is studied as part of her oeuvre and as a reaction to the 19th-century craze over the Gothic novel.

Bibliography
Mansell, Darrell. The Novels of Jane Austen: An Interpretation. London: Macmillan, 1974.
Ross, Josephine. Jane Austen: A Companion. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003.