Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey is a novel by Jane Austen, published posthumously in 1817, in which the Gothic-obsessed Catherine Morland mistakes an ordinary English abbey for the setting of a Radcliffe romance. A parody that runs Gothic romance inside a comedy of manners, it is set for HSC English Extension 1, elective Hybrid Worlds.

Jane Austen drafted Northanger Abbey in 1798-99, but it appeared only posthumously in 1817 - a period piece about a craze it outlived: the Gothic novel, above all Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, whose ruined castles, buried secrets and persecuted heroines were the shared furniture of a generation of readers. The novel is engineered as a hybrid, running the plot machinery of Gothic romance inside an ordinary domestic comedy of manners so the two forms are forced into the same rooms and made to embarrass each other. Catherine Morland, an unremarkable clergyman's daughter whose imagination has been "in training for a heroine" on exactly the fiction Austen is parodying, is taken to Bath and launched into its social season. Volume One is pure comedy of manners: she befriends the charming, mercenary Isabella Thorpe, is pursued by Isabella's boorish brother John, and falls for the witty clergyman Henry Tilney and his gentle sister Eleanor - the perils are broken engagements, cut dances and the reading of character. Invited to the Tilneys' abbey in Volume Two, Catherine arrives primed by Udolpho to expect gloom and horror. Her imagination transforms a mislaid laundry list into a mysterious manuscript and General Tilney into a wife-murderer, until Henry discovers her suspicions and rebukes her, and the fantasy collapses. Yet the novel's sting is that Catherine was not wholly wrong: the General, no murderer but a domestic tyrant, expels her from the house without escort on learning she is not the heiress he supposed. Realism, having mocked the Gothic, turns out to contain its own cruelty; the couple marry, and the narrator closes with a parodic flourish on the book's own moral.

The collision of genres is present in the novel's first breath. The mock-heroic opening - "No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine." - invokes the heroine-convention only to negate it, yoking the Gothic template and an ordinary Wiltshire child in a single clause, while the narrator's mock-fatalism about what "cannot prevent her" exposes the machinery of plot as machinery.

The book is also intensely intertextual, an argument about the novel inside a novel. Austen breaks the frame to defend the form she is writing in - "Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers" - and redefines the maligned "only a novel" as "only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed", naming Burney's and Edgeworth's real novels so that Northanger Abbey stands openly among its peers rather than pretending to be a sealed world.

At the abbey, parody works by completing the convention's form and betraying its content. The Gothic set-piece of the discovered manuscript resolves into anticlimax - "if the evidence of sight might be trusted, she held a washing-bill in her hand." - and the pivot from the sensational to the probable is performed at the level of the sentence: "The visions of romance were over. Catherine was completely awakened."

Realism is asserted as the corrective genre in Henry's rebuke - "Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians." - and in his confidence that modern England, "surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies", is too transparent for Gothic secrecy. But the correction is itself interrogated: surveillance and exposure are precisely what expel Catherine, and Austen's realist ethics of the "general though unequal mixture of good and bad" in every heart proves to contain a domestic tyranny quite as cruel as anything the Gothic fantasised. Neither genre is granted the last word.

The metafiction holds the hybrid permanently open. The narrator points to "the tell-tale compression of the pages" to predict the book's own ending, and the mock-moral - leaving it "to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience" - offers two absurd lessons and chooses neither: the refusal of a single tendency is the refusal of a single genre.

• North and South
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
• As You Like It
• Possession
• The Collected Stories
• Memento
• HSC English resources