I treasure Northanger Abbey for the feeling it gives of a young Jane writing to a young us. The author knows what it is to be free from design, to fall into youthful error, and to have a mind full of unspoken dreams.
Catherine Morland is immediately relatable to almost any sympathetic reader who has ever been a young woman. She is especially the kindred spirit of those who grew up cherishing the "strange girls" of fiction. From L.M. Montgomery's Anne Shirley, to Frances Hodgson Burnett's Sara Crewe, to Gene Stratton-Porter's Elnora Comstock, we know our friends when we see them, and Miss Morland might even be called the mother of the genre.
I was raised on Austen, and while my favorite of her novels is Mansfield Park for its fascinating intended treatment of the subject of ordination, I've come to see Northanger Abbey as a kind of precursor to the later book.
Catherine captivates me in part as a touchstone of sociology. Her story is set amid religious edifices, and yet she is in search of mystery. She hopes something wonderful will happen to her.
She grows up in her father's parsonage. She worships beside her new friend in Bath. She falls in love with a clergyman, and goes to stay at his family's abbey. She is destined to seek her happiness as a clergyman's wife at Woodston. Mature religion is full of awe, but Catherine doesn't know it yet.
Moreover, when Catherine's fancy runs away with her at Northanger Abbey, the book treats us to a remarkable and valuable picture of how England's religious past had become utterly strange to its inhabitants within a few generations of the Reformation. The abbey would have been stolen from its monks in a seizure by the Crown, and then given or sold to the rising class of the landed gentry - people like the Tilneys. Rather than knowing that her own family would once have had among its numbers monks in abbeys and nuns in convents, Catherine is so removed from her heritage that she sees the humble religious folk of the past as subjects of the potential "horridness" that thrills her.
Whether it is intended to or not, Northanger Abbey is rich in important insights about what can happen to people when upheaval severs them from their roots and they lose the ability to see themselves in the past. The vacuum can be filled with fear and mistakes. Catherine Morland, wandering in the ruins of Catholicism, deserves serious study from professional scholars.
From friend to friend, though, I always hope that Catherine will find plenty of strange splendor in her Anglican tradition. Nevertheless, I can't help sighing a little at the line Austen gives us when her unlikely heroine's imagination leads her into folly and disgrace:
"The visions of romance were over."
While it is a relief to see Catherine gain in good sense, I hope there will always be a little room for the mystical in her life. Both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien firmly believed that real faith requires some degree of imagination. I would not want Miss Morland to lose all of hers as a result of growing up. Sometimes, we pay a high price to be thought "realistic" by the world, and Catherine's path is as full of food for thought about the skills of discernment as it is with wit and entertainment.
Jane Austen was so young when she wrote this story. Its keen observations make me wonder how much she understood about life vs. how much I am reading into it as an older person. When I was a girl, I read Northanger Abbey with wide eyes. Now, I peer at it with ponderings. But then, I remember that Jane was a genius and a "strange girl" herself in the very best way. It won't do to underrate her. Northanger Abbey has an atmosphere and flavor all its own, and an odd power to reconnect us with the poignancy of our own youth. I turn to it again and again, knowing I will be charmed.
I hope you will enjoy spending three minutes with Miss Morland on her adventure in this video short: