33 Reasons Why We Can’t Stop Reading Jane Austen), suggests that Henry and Catherine are the least suited hero and heroine in any of Austen’s novels. He argues that Henry Tilney’s reference on Beechen Hill to the inclosure of forests “establishes a tension between poetry and history, between the probably and the actual, so that the reader is encouraged to make comparisons between the fictional context of the narrative and the historical context outside the narrative.” This political context is further widened by the reference to the food riots in London (far more Gothic than those in the Gothic romances.)Īnother critic, Susannah Carson ( A Truth Universally Acknowledged. Robert Hawkins, to whom we owe the above idea, believes that the novel is the most political of Jane Austen’s works (see his “General Tilney and Affairs of State: the Political Gothic of Northanger Abbey” in Northanger Abbey: A Norton Critical Edition). This in turn adds to the humour of General Tilney as a voluntary spy supposedly trawling through pamphlets in search of sedition in the dead of night, for the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property. Further, his family coat of arms in the church at Shelly Hall in Suffolk revealed intermarriage between the Tilneys and the Thorpes. For instance, Jane, as a staunch supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots, would have been only too aware that Sir Charles Tilney, hanged drawn and quartered for his part in the Babington Plot, in 1586 had planned to kill Elizabeth 1 (whom Jane detested). It is so clever, sophisticated, ambitious and playful that many of the allusions are lost on us today.

Virginia Woolf apparently saw it as “a girl of 15 laughing at the world”. It is in many respects a teenager playing a game with her readers.

Various editions of Northanger Abbey: Surprise, surprise, Penguin wins again!

Tilney austen