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"Northanger Abbey" is situated between Jane Austen's two great masterpieces "Pride and Prejudice" and "Sense and Sensibility," and the line of other less successful novels such as "Emma," "Persuasion," and "Mansfield Park." It is the least known of Austen's novels, sold by the author herself to a publisher in 1803 (who did not publish it), bought back by her family, and published posthumously in 1818, a year after her death.
The story recounts the tale of Catherine Moreland, a seventeen-year-old girl raised in the English countryside who is sent to Bath to make her social debut, accompanied by two trusted friends of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Allen. It is with Mrs. Allen, a petulant and silly woman obsessed with muslin, that she meets the deceitful Isabella Thorpe and her arrogant brother John, who are friends of Henry Tilney, with whom Catherine falls madly in love. Through various adventures, misunderstandings, and intrigues, Catherine ends up at Northanger Abbey, a guest of Henry and his tyrannical father, General Tilney. Northanger is a former abbey where the Tilneys live and where Mrs. Tilney died under unclear circumstances. Here Catherine's vivid imagination, fueled by her avid reading of Gothic novels, leads her to imagine Northanger as a cursed place inhabited by evil spirits, resulting in another endless series of misunderstandings, until the good resolution at the end when everything seems lost, and Catherine returns disheartened to her parents.
The typical elements of early 19th-century romantic comedy, and particularly Jane Austen's style, are all present: first of all, the female character, usually in decent economic circumstances, possessing a nearly childish frivolity but also the personality and maturity typical of adult women, here mentioned as the anti-heroine in contrast to the classical example of the Gothic novel; then there is the prince charming, in this case, Henry Tilney, the idealized example of a perfect and amiable man with a certain social position and thus in excellent financial standing. Surrounding them are the supporting characters who influence the protagonists' choices or actions (in this case, the Thorpes and the Allens), pushing everything in the wrong direction until the end, when it seems that the love story is doomed not to materialize. But Jane Austen was a lover of positive endings, and through clarification, the much-worried marriage is always reached. Paradoxically, the author never married.
As in all her novels, the predominant aspect is therefore sentiment. Another literary device Austen often employs is the misunderstanding, although in "Northanger Abbey," as the title suggests, a predominant role is undoubtedly occupied by the location, this former convent that is likened in every way to the castle of Udolpho, the famous manor masterfully described by Radcliffe (the novel is repeatedly mentioned in the text). Therefore, this work is also to be understood as a picaresque vision of the Gothic, a sort of light-hearted literary parody. Another very important place is the famous English spa town of Bath, a true center of social aggregation, where the story initially takes place and where the author lived between 1800 and 1806 and received the only marriage proposal of her life.
In the novel, on the action level, absolutely nothing happens: as mentioned at the beginning of this review, there is little new compared to Austen's illustrious novels, and it is a starting point towards the minor novels that the author will write later.
It remains a pleasant endpoint for those (like me) who have read all the English Gothic novels. Generally, however, the work is seen as mediocre, the result of a style absent from evolutions and stuck at the same starting point, namely the milestone of the romantic genre "Pride and Prejudice," which I would feel inclined to recommend reading over this modest book reviewed here.
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