Jane Austen

Northanger Abbey Jane Austen

Northanger Abbey was written when Austen was relatively young (before 1800), well before the 1812 publication of Sense and Sensibility. Although it was written over a decade before Persuasion, the two were posthumously co-published in 1818 by her family. In Northanger Abbey, an early parody of Gothic fiction, Austen upends eighteenth-century fictional conventions by making her heroine a plain, undistinguished girl from a middle-class family, allowing her to fall in love with the hero before he gives her a thought and exposing her romantic fears and curiosity as groundless. According to Claire Tomalin, Austen may have begun the novel (more comic than her other works, with literary allusions her parents and siblings would have enjoyed) as family entertainment to be read aloud by the fireside. Joan Aiken writes, "We can guess that Susan [the original title of Northanger Abbey], in its first outline, was written very much for family entertainment, addressed to a family audience, like all Jane Austen's juvenile works, with their asides to the reader, and absurd dedications; some of the juvenilia, we know, were specifically addressed to her brothers Charles and Frank; all were designed to be circulated and read by a large network of relations."