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Jane Austen
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Austen opens by deflating every Gothic heroine cliché: Catherine Morland is plain, cheerful, and raised in a large healthy family with no tragic backstory, dead mother, or tyrannical father locking daughters away. Her father is a comfortable clergyman named Richard; her mother survives repeated childbirths with rude good health. Catherine as a child prefers cricket to dolls, fails at music and drawing, shirks French, and rolls down hills instead of collecting accomplishments, yet she is kind to her younger siblings and not actually wicked.
By fifteen she improves in looks and begins curling her hair and longing for balls. From fifteen to seventeen she reads novels and stockpiles dramatic quotations she expects to quote in future crises. She still cannot draw a lover's profile because she has no lover. Fullerton offers no romantic material: no lord, no baronet, no mysterious ward, no handsome stranger left on the doorstep, and not even a squire's son in the parish.
When wealthy neighbours Mr. and Mrs. Allen invite Catherine to Bath for his gout, her parents agree readily and Catherine is thrilled. An ordinary girl in an unromantic village is about to be sent where something can actually happen, and Austen has already told us her heart is affectionate and her disposition open.
We often treat ordinary life as a waiting room and perform extraordinariness to feel worthy of attention. Catherine memorizes heroine quotations and collects dramatic lines while living in Fullerton with no lord, baronet, or mystery until the Allens invite her to Bath.
Before you try to look remarkable, ask whether you are developing real skill and character or rehearsing a story you think other people expect.
This chapter
No one would have supposed her born to be an heroine, and the narrator is pleased to say so. The family is large, the mother is well, and the house has no locked wing for a plot to hide in. Catherine will later treat a strong feeling as evidence. She starts in a life so ordinary that a story has to be borrowed before it can be believed.
Continue this thoughtA Life That Has Not StartedCatherine prepares for her grand adventure in Bath, but first Austen wants to make sure we understand exactly what kind of heroine we're dealing with. What happens when an ordinary girl steps into extraordinary circumstances?
What this chapter proves — the pattern beneath the scene
Northanger Abbey is a story about a girl whose favourite novels have already written her expectations for her: a heroine trained on Gothic plots who mistakes a locked cabinet for a confession, a friend who performs sisterhood while hunting a richer husband, and a General whose welcome is a wager on a fortune that turns out not to exist, told through a promised walk hijacked by a liar, a forbidden drawer that holds nothing but laundry bills, and a dawn dismissal that arrives with no warning she can use in company.
In this chapter, the lesson is A Drawer Full of Bills.
The card below names the pattern this chapter proves — carry it with you into the original text.
A Drawer Full of Bills
Catherine is not born for the part. She rolls down hills, then spends two years filling her memory with lines a heroine might need. The books are not the crime. The training is: she is studying a script for a life that has not started, and she will try to cast Bath and Gloucestershire in those roles.
Chapter 01
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings—and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper,…
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Other theme-by-theme analyses from this book.
Tell performed devotion from real character: Isabella's instant sisterhood and John's crude lies versus Henry's questions and Eleanor's steady kindness.
Test assumptions against evidence, from accepting every excuse to Henry's challenge on what is probable, not merely possible.
Deep diving the literary elements.
Guides, life skills, and the full library.More ways to read Northanger Abbey: guides, life skills, and the wider library.
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Key Insight
Fiction becomes a problem when it is treated as rehearsal rather than as art. Catherine is not stupid for loving Udolpho. She is unprepared for a country that will not cast her as its Gothic lead.
“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.”
