Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way. When a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Northanger Abbey is self-aware from its very first line: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.” Read more: Friday essay: romance fiction rewrites the rulebook Training to be a heroine, by reading

However, her defence of the novel and its pleasures continues to resonate today for many readers of popular romance fiction: a literary form often imagined as “trashy”, and about whose readers (again, frequently young women) concern is often expressed.Įmphasis is often placed on the harm books can do to their readers (interestingly, one university has chosen to place trigger warnings on Northanger Abbey for “gender stereotypes” and “toxic relationships and friendships”) however, here, Austen focuses on the pleasure and delight books can provoke and takes it seriously.

Northanger Abbey is a pointed response to moralising texts like James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1766) – yes, the one that Mr Collins is so fond of in Pride and Prejudice – as well as to a broader literary culture that devalued novels and worried about their effects on their (young women) readers. Here, Austen is speaking about the context in which she was writing. “here seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them,” Austen writes in chapter five, directly addressing the reader – and assuring them that she has no interest in doing the same. A biting satire of popular 19th-century Gothic romances, Northanger Abbey is also a passionate defence of the novel and of novel-reading.

Tilney austen