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Provided by the Author(S) and University College Dublin Library in Accordance with Publisher Policies Provided by the author(s) and University College Dublin Library in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Title Not fit to be mentioned: legal ghosts and displaced narratives in the Northanger 'Horrid' novels Authors(s) Mangan, Christine Publication date 2015 Publisher University College Dublin. School of English, Drama and Film Link to online version http://dissertations.umi.com/ucd:10041 Item record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/6801 Downloaded 2021-09-27T07:25:42Z The UCD community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters! (@ucd_oa) © Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. Introduction “I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocketbook. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.” “Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?” “Yes, quite sure.”1 This oft-quoted passage from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), in which the character Isabella Thorpe provides the heroine Catherine Morland with a reading list of eighteenth-century Gothic novels, is the source from which critics would later assemble these individual volumes into a collective attribution known as ‘The Northanger ‘Horrid’ Novels.’ Initially believed to be fictitious titles created by Austen, when rumors of their existence first began to circulate the critic George Saintsbury declared: “I should like some better authority than Miss Isabella Thorpe’s to assure me of their existence.”2 So began a long tradition that inherently linked the ‘Horrid’ novels to Austen and Northanger Abbey—an association that would prove detrimental to the former. While various sources claim that the search for the ‘Horrid’ novels was instigated by Montague Summers in 1916 when he wrote a letter to the readers of Notes and Queries inquiring after the “horrid romances” mentioned by Austen, the existence of the ‘Horrid’ novels was actually confirmed fifteen years prior by Professor John Louis Haney, who wrote to the Editors at Modern Language Notes in 1901: It might be supposed that Miss Austen, in her evident satire of the Udolpho class of fiction, invented the above suggestive titles of contemporary romances. As a matter of fact, they were all actual romances which appeared at London between 1793-1798.3 1 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey 1818, ed. Susan Fraiman (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 24-25. 2 George Saintsbury, quoted in Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller, Frederick S. Frank, Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographic Guide (Westport: Greenwood, 2001), 37. 3 John Louis Haney, "Northanger Abbey," Modern Language Notes 16 (1901): 446-47. 1 Haney concluded his correspondence by providing “references to various magazines and reviews of the day” in order to substantiate his finding.4 The titles and their authors were revealed to include: Eliza Parsons’ The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and The Mysterious Warning (1796), Regina Maria Roche’s Clermont (1798), Peter Teuthold’s The Necromancer: Or the Tale of the Black Forest (1794), Francis Lathom’s The Midnight Bell (1798), Eleanor Sleath’s The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) and Karl Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries (1796). Surprisingly, for nearly thirty years following this discovery no further examination of the individual novels and their possible connections to Austen’s Northanger Abbey was undertaken. It was not until 1927 when Michael Sadleir presented the English Association in Westminster School Hall with his paper "The Northanger Novels: A Footnote to Jane Austen," that a critical analysis of the ‘Horrid’ novels first appeared. Sadleir argued that Austen’s selections of Gothic texts were “rather deliberate than random,” and chosen in part because of their representational status, which he categorized as including: “sensibility romances, pseudo-German terror novels, and mock-autobiographies.”5 While Sadleir posited that Austen’s selections were “made for the stories’ rather than their titles’ sake,” Devendra Varma, in The Gothic Flame (1957), focuses on the latter, arguing that Austen’s reading list represents a careful deliberation that encompasses the development of the popularity of Gothic from its start to demise.6 Varma points, for example, to the structural similarities between Austen’s first title, Eliza Parsons’ The Castle of Wolfenbach, and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, the latter of which is often considered the first Gothic novel. That both texts incorporate the word ‘castle’ is indicative, claims Varma, of Austen’s overall design, with her placement of Parsons’ title intended to signal the start of Gothic in its mimicry of 4 Haney, “Northanger Abbey,” 446. 5 Michael Sadleir, “The Northanger Novels, A Footnote to Jane Austen,” The English Association, no. 68 (1927), 9. Tenille Nowak, “Regina Maria Roche’s “Horrid” Novel: Echoes of Clermont in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey,” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal no. 29 (2007): 184-193. Conversely, Tenille Nowak argues, if in fact Austen had selected these texts based solely on their representative qualities, as Sadleir argues, there were a large number of contemporary texts that would have been far more appropriate. 6 Devendra Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences (Russell & Russell, 1966), 4. 2 Walpole.7 Varma’s analysis is ultimately problematic, as it remains confined exclusively to the titles of the ‘Horrid’ novels and their chronological arrangement within the list, thus disregarding the possibility of intertextual connections between the ‘Horrid’ novels and Northanger Abbey. Indeed, Tenille Nowak argues that Varma’s reliance on titles alone “severely limits understanding of and appreciation for…Austen’s writing abilities,” and instead suggests that Austen’s selections are based on “the inherent values and merits she discovered in each text.” 8 Despite such claims, limited scholarship exists on the ‘Horrid’ novels, with references either confined to brief allusions or disregarded entirely within a type of criticism that continues to privilege the intertextuality between Northanger Abbey and the other two Gothic novels mentioned by Isabella Thorpe, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). The aforementioned Michael Sadleir was among the first to speculate on Austen’s presumed disdain for the ‘Horrid’ novels, claiming that due to their “lack of restraint and very miscellaneous talent,” Austen “could have felt neither respect nor tendress” for them.9 Bette B. Roberts also argues for Austen’s disregard for the novels while, similarly to Sadleir and Varma, focusing her analysis on the textual placement of the novels within Thorpe’s list. Noting that “Austen does not arrange these books in chronological order; nor does she group together the two works written by one author, Eliza Parsons,” Roberts contends that “Austen does not list these particular works as representatives of the history of Gothic fiction rather, she regards them in all likelihood as typical of the very worst of the genre,” therefore suggesting that “Austen’s omission of Radcliffe from the list is no accident.”10 More recently, Emily Auerbach conjectures that: One suspects that Austen somehow knew even before she became a famous author that these lightweight gothic writers of the day would never become household words; that they lacked her own gift of 7 Varma, The Gothic Flame, 4. 8 Nowak, “Regina Maria Roche’s “Horrid” Novel,”184-193. 9 Michael Sadleir “‘All Horrid?’: Jane Austen and the Gothic Romance,” in Things Past (London: Constable, 1994), 167-200. 10 Bette B. Roberts, “The Horrid Novels: The Mysteries of Udolpho and Northanger Abbey,” in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth W. Graham (New York: AMS Press, 1989), quoted in Douglass, Voller, Frank, Gothic Writers, 39. 3 universality. Can one imagine thousands of Mrs. Parsons society members with bumper stickers on their cars proclaiming, “I’d rather be reading Mrs. Parsons”?11 The assumption that “Austen quietly distinguishes between Radcliffe and her imitators,” with “her satirical target…not so much Udolpho as the torrent of clumsy replicas that followed in its wake—replicas such as the seven novels ‘of the same kind’” continues to persist, relegating the “Horrid’ novels’ status to that of “bone-chillers” which “imitated and debased Radcliffe’s example.”12 Minerva Press: Reception and Rejection The relegation of the ‘Horrid’ novels to hack or pulp writing of inferior quality can perhaps partially be explained by their enduring connection to their publisher, Minerva Press, and its owner, William Lane. His official career as a bookseller began in his father’s poultry shop, with Lane eventually settling into the future premises of Minerva Press, at No. 33 Leadenhall Street, in 1775. Although Minerva Press dominated the publishing market by the 1790s—the decade in which all seven ‘Horrid’ novels were published—Lane continued to fight for “honourable recognition” among his contemporaries as “cartoons and satirical odes lampooned Lane as the ‘chicken-butcher’ and ‘scribbling poulterer,’” a nod to his humble beginnings.13 In addition to the creation of his publishing house, Lane was also heavily responsible for the spread of circulating libraries throughout England as, realizing that the majority of the public was not willing, or indeed able, to purchase a novel printed by Minerva Press (as they were both expensive and meant to be read but once, purely for entertainment), Lane also placed a considerable amount of his energies into the creation 11 Emily Auerbach, Searching for Jane Austen (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 87. 12 Thomas Keymer, “Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 26.
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