Northanger Abbey

chapter 4 The Idea of the Irrational: Northanger Abbey Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves. jane austen, Northanger Abbey, Volume ii, Chapter 10 Few nowadays would have any objection to William Wordsworth being described as a Romantic writer. And his work—by comparison with The Four Zoas, or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or The Eve of St Agnes, or Prometheus Unbound, at any rate—is at the realist end of the spectrum, by any definition of the term, “aesthetic” or “ethical.” The stories of Goody Blake and Harry Gill, or Simon Lee, or the Margaret who once occupied the ruined cottage are almost as prosaic as they are poetic, by design. But Jane Austen is a different case. There has been a long literary-critical history of setting her apart from the major Romantic poets. (For Jerome McGann, for example, her work is “basically, quite un-Romantic.”1) And it is precisely the realism associated with her fiction—her “little bit of ivory” and “two or three families in a country village”—that has, as often as not, been at the root of that exclusion or occlusion. Indeed, the realism of Austen’s fiction has frequently been seen as the continuation, even the summation, of the fic- tional traditions laid down in the eighteenth century, from Daniel Defoe to Frances Burney. So Austen is an important case for the set of studies offered here, and not just because George Levine put her and Frankenstein at the origin of a “second start” in English novelistic realism. A realist she is almost universally recog- nized to be; but is she a Romantic? Once upon a time, after all, the terms were regarded as positively antithetical. “There is an element directly opposed to romanticism,” Lascelles Abercrombie wrote in 1926: “it is realism.” “In all respects life in this world is likely to be most satisfactory,” he went on, sum- marizing Romantic attitudes, “when the mind withdraws from outer things 1 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 29. But see Susan Morgan, “Jane Austen and Romanticism,” in J. David Grey (ed.), The Jane Austen Companion (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 364–8: “It is time to recognize that while Austen need not be termed a romantic in the tradition of Wordsworth or Coleridge, her work is firmly a part of the romantic revolution in British literature.” “Writing the literary history of Austen and romanticism,” Morgan argues, “means…rewriting the literary history of the novel.” © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi �0.��63/9789004308�76_006 <UN> The Idea of the Irrational 101 and turns in upon itself. That is the habit of mind which has acquired the name of romanticism.”2 Therefore, in so far as William Deresiewicz’s Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets spells out qualities in Austen’s last three last novels that are Romantic, it is of great assistance to my overall sense of Austen as the peer of Wordsworth and Byron. But there is a price to be paid where his work is con- cerned, and an introductory discussion of his view will clarify what the remain- der of this chapter has to offer, as regards Northanger Abbey in particular. i It is Deresiewicz’s contention that Austen’s novels fall into two groups of three, separated by a gap of twelve years. Austen was, he writes, twenty-three—a brilliant girl, in her nephew’s terms—when she finished the last of the three manuscripts that would later become the novels of the early phase. Her father was still alive and well, their family home in Steventon still unthreatened by the prospect of removal. By the time she began Mansfield Park at the age of thirty-five, however, her father had died; her family had moved house six times, among three different towns, with long intervals, after two of the removals, of shuttling from friend to friend; she had accepted a proposal of marriage just short of her twenty- seventh birthday…then rejected it the next morning; she had sold the manuscript of Northanger Abbey…only to see it languish on the publish- er’s shelf; and at last, her family having settled in the Chawton cottage she would call home for the rest of her life, she had seen Sense and Sensibility accepted for publication and put into proof. The brilliant girl had become a mature woman.3 For Deresiewicz the key human experiences intervening in the twelve years between Austen’s “early phase” and the beginning of Mansfield Park (apart from her growing authorial self-confidence) were loss (of her father), a deeper sense of home (produced by movement and final settlement), and emotional ambiv- alence (over her aborted marriage). But he goes on to argue that such emotional experiences were exactly those communicated to her by “the flowering of the poetic movement that became known as British Romanticism”—above 2 Lascelles Abercrombie, Romanticism (1926; London: High Hill Books, 1963), 30, 42. 3 Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 1–2, quoting James Edward Austen’s Memoir concerning “the brilliant girl and the mature woman.” <UN>.

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