Jane Austen
There was more to Austen than snapshots of gentry life
The ever popular Jane Austen is known for her witty critiques of the upper and middle classes of her time, but she was also a talented satirist of other genres. Northanger Abbey (1817) offers a clever parody of Gothic fiction, notably that of Austen’s contemporary Ann Radcliffe. Austen’s Gothic-obsessed heroine Catherine Morland supplies the humour, thanks to her courter Henry Tilney mocking the genre on the pair’s journey to Northanger Abbey, imitating Radcliffe’s The Romance Of The Forest, merged with The Mysteries Of Udolpho. Austen – who valued the individuality of her flawed heroines – is said to have been influenced in childhood by her family to appreciate a quick wit, and this resulted in her sharp writing. In the Quarterly Review, popular novelist Walter Scott intimated that the Gothic ‘romance’ moulded in the 1790s by himself and others, had been supplanted by tales of ordinary life, with Austen leading the charge.
But he couldn’t help adding to this praise, the contrast of his fictional world to Jane’s depictions of “the middling classes of society”: “Presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him.”
“If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.” Northanger Abbey