Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen...social commentary and satire of all horrid novels!

  I am a fan of Jane Austen books and movies. I think I own all the various versions of the movie Pride and Prejudice that are available on dvd. Northanger Abbey is the first of Ms. Austen's novels that was readied for publication but one of the last to actually be published. The novel is a satire of the Gothic novels that were popular in the late 1700's (novels involving romantic adventure, soap opera type plots, emotional drama, and a touch of the supernatural). 

 

Satire: noun

1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc. (dictionary.com)

Northanger Abbey was a social commentary on the time period as novels (fiction stories) were considered frivolous at the time and classical literature and non-fiction were accepted as socially acceptable and not frivolous. At the time, such 'novels' were deemed to have a damaging effect on young, impressionable, female minds. We see in Northanger Abbey that the 17 year old heroine of the book, Catherine, is not damaged by her love of reading such novels, she just has some growing up to do. Shmoop.com makes a nice analogy of Northanger Abbey: think of it and the books it parodies as a modern day author doing a spoof of something like Twilight.

Austen had originally named the novel "Susan" and then changed it to "Catherine" when she reworked the manuscript after the family purchased it back from the publisher in 1813. The publishing house sat on the manuscript for 10 years because they could not decide whether it was worth publishing or not. Her brother had the novel published in December of 1817, several months after his sister died. 

Movie scene with Northanger Abbey (Lismore Castle) in the distance.

Two movies have been made of the book, one in 1986 and another in 2007. It is a coming of age story about a sheltered teen age girl, one of 10 children of a country clergyman. The main character, Catherine, loves reading Gothic novels and reads works by Ann Radcliffe during the story. The novel also lists other Gothic novels (called Horrid Novels) and at first it was believed that Austen made up those works but they turned out to be real stories that had been previously published by the time Northanger Abbey was written. (A list of the Horrid Novels will be given shortly, and they have been recently re-published for readers who are in interested in obtaining them.) Northanger Abbey has proven itself to have timeless appeal with the universal themes of growing up, the nature of love, the nature of friendship, and explores human relationships and behavior.

Another view of Lismore Castle.

 

The movie setting was Lismore Castle, which is located in Waterford County, Ireland, ancestral home of the Dukes of Cork (The Boyles). Originally built in 1185 at the location of a former Abbey, it has had some famous owners and residents such as; Robert Boyle, of Boyle's Law, who is considered one of the father's of Modern Chemistry and the Scientific Method, and William Cavendish; 4^th Duke of Cavendish who became Prime Minister of Great Britain and Ireland for

approximately 8 months in 1756-7.

The 6^th Duke of Cavendish, known as the "Bachelor Duke" refurbished the castle in the Gothic Style in the early 1800's. The present Duke maintains an apartment in the castle but it is not his principal residence. Today there is an art gallery in the west wing and the lovely gardens are open to the public. Visitors can also rent rooms for a vacation stay in the castle. I couldn't find any ghost stories connected to Lismore Castle but as we all know...every castle has it's ghosts, the locals probably know. We need to book a few rooms and find out for ourselves!

 List of Horrid Stories mentioned in Northanger Abbey:

• Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) by Eliza Parsons. London: Minerva Press.
• Clermont (1798) by Regina Maria Roche. London: Minerva Press.
• The Mysterious Warning, a German Tale (1796) by Eliza Parsons. London: Minerva Press.
• The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest (1794) by 'Ludwig Flammenberg' (pseudonym for Carl Friedrich Kahlert; translated by Peter Teuthold). London: Minerva Press.
• The Midnight Bell (1798) by Francis Lathom. London: H. D. Symonds.
• The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) by Eleanor Sleath. London: Minerva Press.
• Horrid Mysteries (1796) by the Marquis de Grosse (translated by P. Will). London: Minerva Press.
  

All seven of these were republished by the Folio Society in London in the 1960s, and since 2005 Valancourt Books has released new editions of the first six. (Wiki)