The secret of Northanger Abbey

Essays in Criticism

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 13-32

  Neill, Edward ^a  

^a MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63249107276     PISSN: 00140856     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/eic/47.1.13     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. Peter Medawar, Memoir of a Thinking Radish, (Oxford, 1986), p. 89
2. Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen, Politics and the Novel, (Chicago, 1988), p. 28: 'Jane Austen's earliest literary productions are the fruit of unparalled self-assurance'
3. while Raymond Williams ascribes 'a remarkably confident way of seeing and judging' to her in The Country and the City, (1985), p. 115
4. Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, the Prince of Abissinia: A Tale (1759), title of Chapter 43
5. All quotations from text of Northanger Abbey, ed. Marilyn Butler, (Harmondsworth, 1955)
6. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819, (Oxford, 1984), p. 15
7. Claudia Johnson, op. cit., p. 37
8. W. H. Auden, 'Macao,' in Collected Poems, ed. E. Mendelson, (1976), p. 145
9. A. W. Litz, Jane Austen. A Study of Her Artistic Development, (1965), p. 64
10. This occurred on 16th August 1819; Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy was based on this event. See Complete Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson, (1904), p. 341
11. Reprinted in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam, (1968), p. 106
12. As Nicholas Tredell reports in Culture in Crisis: The Critical Decade, (Manchester, 1993), p. 140, this word is actually used of British workmen by the historian Corelli Barnett
13. William Blake, 'To the Christians,' ('Jerusalem', plate 77), Complete Poetry and Prose, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), p. 231
14. As Frederick M. Keener agreeingly puts it in The Chain of Becoming: The Philosophical Tale, The Novel, and a Neglected Realism of the Enlightenment: Swift, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Johnson and Austen, (New York, 1983), p. 241, 'not even "narrative voice" is a priori perfectly reliable'
15. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute, (Brighton, 1977), p. 167
16. James Boswell, A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, (1909), p. 53
17. Luce Irigaray, cited in French Philosophers in Conversation, ed. Raoul Mortley, (1991), p. 64. It is, therefore
18. difficult to agree with lively, opinionated Roger Gard when he claims that 'it is quite possible to find something mitigating, even appealing, in the General's excessive compunction over the health of an heiress' in Jane Austen's Novels: The Art of Clarity, (1992), p. 55
19. Anne Crippen Ruderman also notes her 'artless simplicity that is more like Harriet Smith than like Emma' in The Pleasures of Virtue: Political Thought in the Novels of Jane Austen, (1995), p. 35; but after all, Northanger Abbey is in its way a kind of Bildungsroman, so perhaps we should expect the heroine to be in a fairly formative, not entirely predictable (or even volatile) condition
20. This instability is partly the result of the process by which Jane Austen 'asserts the possibility of a woman's morality and a woman's resistance, even as she perpetuates the tradition which has made both so necessary and so difficult to represent'. See Jane Miller, Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture, (1990), p. 37
21. As René Girard puts it, 'The coquette does not wish to surrender her precious self to the desire which she arouses, but were she not to provoke it, she would not feel so precious', in Deceit, Desire and the Novel Self and Other in Literary Structure, tr. Yvonne Freccero, (1965), p. 105
22. John Dussinger acknowledges the resemblance between Henry and Mr. Bennet in his In the Pride of the Moment: Encounters in Jane Austen's World, (Ohio, 1990), p. 123
23. Quoted by Juliet McMaster, 'Love and Marriage', in The Jane Austen Handbook, ed. J. David Grey, (1986), p. 231
24. As reproduced in William Blake: Selected Poetry, ed. David V. Erdman, (1976), p. 107
25. Howard Babb speaks triumphantly of Catherine's 'finally winning Henry, the champion of reason', Henry being a figure for whom male pedagogues have ready sympathy, in Jane Austen's Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue, (Columbus, Ohio, 1962), p. 98
26. or, as Katrin Ristkok Burlin puts it: '. . . he is an eager teacher, she, an ardent pupil; she is fond of him, he is fond of admiration', in 'The Four Fictions of Northanger Abbey', in Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, ed. John Halperin, (Cambridge, 1975), p. 91
27. William Blake, 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell', in The Complete Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson, (1971), p. 115
28. But Patricia Beer, in Reader, I Married Him: A Study of the Women Characters of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, (1974), has even stronger words for Austen's heroes: 'They have traces of arrogance, conceit and sadism, but these traces are well-concealed. They teach, humiliate, punish, frustrate and tantalise the women they love' (p. 68)
29. and Henry in particular is himself far from being universally loved. B. C. Southam (ed.) Jane Austen: 'Northanger Abbey' and 'Sense and Sensibility'. A Casebook, (1976), thinks Henry is 'condemned out of his own mouth', and he is also attacked (e.g.) by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, (1979), pp. 138-40
30. and Judith Wilt in Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot and Lawrence, (Princeton, 1980), pp. 149ff