Lamron Lit Corner: How Jane Austen’s lost novel came to be

Northanger Abbey was published together with Persuasion in a bundle in Dec. 1817, less than six months after Jane Austen died. While these were the last of Austen’s novels to reach publication, Persuasion was the last novel Austen wrote, while Northanger Abbey was actually her first. Originally known as Susan, the book was sold for only ten pounds in 1803 where it sat in purgatory until Austen’s brother bought it back from the company where Austen was able to continue to revise it and prepare it for publishing. 

Although Northanger Abbey comes to us from an odd mish-mash of publishing, sitting, revising, etc., it is my favorite Jane Austen novel by far. Starring Catherine Morland as a young girl about to be sent off to Bathe on a part-vacation, part-escape, the story sets up and executes the perfect amount of irony and satire to place it among the best novels of the early nineteenth century.

Jane Austen often gets the reputation of a “romance writer,” to the aggravation of all who have read her books. Austen wrote satire first and foremost, meaning she was writing in an attempt to promote introspection through making fun of the absurd nature of high society in England. As a spoiler for all Jane Austen novels, the main couple always gets together, without a doubt. While the journey to get there changes, the point of Austen’s stories is not to be an intricate will-they-won’t-they, and those who only gather that after reading the books are missing the main points of her work.

Take Northanger Abbey, for example—the main love interest of Catherine Morland is Henry Tilney, the dashing and funny son of a prominent military general who owns the titular Northanger Abbey. The antagonist, John Thorpe, represents the exact opposite of Tilney—he is brash and extroverted, constantly trying to build up his own masculinity by talking about racing horses and hunting. All Henry wants is to be a good brother and read and write, connecting to Catherine with this shared interest. There is no real point where the reader is made to believe Catherine will choose John over Henry, but Austen presents the decision nonetheless as an ironic jab at “the marriage decision” imposed on women during this time period.

Or, for another example, Isabella Thorpe—being Catherine’s best friend for the first half of the novel, Catherine unknowingly enters a toxic competition with Isabella to find the best love interest. Despite Catherine being too young and thus probably too naive to know about this competition, the plot line continues to show what women in this time, and even today, are forced to endure, knowingly or otherwise.

It’s hard to define Austen in such a short space, and even after having studied a good number of her novels in a course last semester, I still feel as though I’ve only scraped the surface of what her work represents. If you’ve read Austen before and think her masterwork ends with Pride and Prejudice or Emma, look no further than Northanger Abbey as proof that Austen was as brilliant at the beginning of her career as she was at the end.