Northanger Abbey (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen

Book Preface

Unlike some of Jane Austen’s other works, where the geographical settings are only vaguely indicated, the greater part of this novel is very specifically located in Bath, the elegant inland spa patron-ised for holidays by the wealthy and leisured since the seventeenth century; out of thirty-one chapters, four are set at the heroine’s home in fictitious Fullerton, nine at the eponymous and equally fictitious Northanger Abbey and eighteen in the genuine city of Bath. This emphasis is not surprising, since Bath was a constant backdrop to the life of the Austen family. Jane’s mother, Cassandra Leigh (1739–1827), lived there for some years in her youth, and married the Revd George Austen (1731–1805) at Walcot church in 1764; Cassandra’s elder sister, Jane Leigh, and her husband, Revd Dr Edward Cooper, lived in Royal Crescent and Bennett Street from 1771 to 1783; and Mrs Austen’s brother, James Leigh-Perrot (1735–1812), and his wife, Jane Cholmeley (1744–1836) –a wealthy and childless couple, who are always referred to in Jane Austen’s letters as ‘my uncle’ and ‘my aunt’ – soon developed the habit of spending half the year on their estate in Berkshire and the other half in Bath, at No. 1 Paragon Buildings.
It is not known when Austen herself first became personally acquainted with Bath, but it was probably in the spring/summer of 1794, when she and her elder sister, Cassandra, visited Leigh cousins in Gloucestershire; in travelling to and from Hampshire it would be very surprising if they did not pass through both Bath and Gloucester en route. It must have been this Gloucester-shire trip which gave Austen the local knowledge that she used afterwards for her novel, and no doubt she too stopped off at Petty France to change horses when taking the main road north-wards out of Bath. As we subsequently learn that Catherine Mor-land’s return to Fullerton involved a journey of seventy miles (vol. 2, ch. 13), this means that Austen must have envisaged Northanger Abbey as being somewhere in the Vale of Berkeley, lying on the flood-plain of the river Severn and tucked under the steep west-ern edge of the Cotswold limestone escarpment. Such a location accounts for its name: in Old English hangra,now modernised to ‘hanger’, means ‘a wood on the side of a steeply sloping hill’,1 and Austen unobtrusively but carefully mentions the house as ‘standing low in a valley, sheltered from the north and east by rising woods of oak’ (vol. 2, ch. 2). When Catherine drives up, she finds that ‘so low did the building stand’, it could not be seen from the road (vol. 2, ch. 5); and later, when she walks out with the family to admire the house and grounds, she sees it has ‘steep woody hills rising behind to give it shelter’ (vol. 2, ch. 7)–that is, a hanger to the north. Henry Tilney’s parish of Woodston is also on the Severn flood-plain, as ‘the General seemed to think an apology necessary for the flatness of the country’ (vol. 2, ch. 11). There was no country house in this part of Gloucestershire which in any way resembled Northanger Abbey as described by Austen, hence she could feel safe in plac-ing it there, without being afraid that some local landowner might take offence in the belief he was being pilloried in the character of General Tilney.
Austen’s first recorded visit to Bath was in November/December 1797, when she and her mother and sister stayed with the Leigh-Perrots in Paragon Buildings. Her next visit was in May/June 1799, when her brother, Edward Knight, brought a family party to lodg-ings in Queen Square; and finally, she and her family lived in Bath from 1801 to 1806. It is an interesting possibility that during the 1797 visit she may have met the Revd Sydney Smith, then only a country cleric and tutor to the squire’s son, but soon to become well known as a wit, essayist, moral philosopher and joint founder of the Edinburgh Review in 1802; it was pointed out by John Sparrow2 that Sydney’s conversational style sounds remarkably like that of Henry Tilney, and there is documentary evidence that he paid sev-eral short visits to Bath between October 1797 and January 1798.3 Furthermore, Sydney’s pupil, Michael Hicks Beach, was connected to the Bramston family at Deane, near neighbours of the Austens at Steventon; hence Mrs Austen may have been encouraged by the Bramstons to make contact with Sydney following her arrival with her daughters in Bath.
In the autumn of 1817 Cassandra Austen scribbled a brief mem-orandum of the dates of composition of her sister’s novels, so far as she could recall them, finishing with: ‘North-hanger Abby [sic] was written about the years 98 & 99’,4 which suggests that Austen started it in early 1798 after her winter visit, and finished it in 1799, perhaps after refreshing her imagination and checking her facts during her summer visit. Having decided upon the geograph-ical setting, she planned the action as a parody, or rather, a double parody, of the popular fiction of the period – the conduct novels or novels of manners on the one hand, and the gothic romances on the other. The former, epistolary in style and supposed to be letters to an intimate friend, are set in contemporary English society and follow a courtship plot. The heroine enters the world, encounters fortune-hunters, rakes, and false friends, masters the unstated rules of etiquette and wins the heart of a noble suitor through her natu-ral superiority, exhibited and refined through a series of social and moral tests. The eighteen chapters set in Bath chronicle, in a delib-erately wry and prosaic style, the problems that beset the naive and trusting Catherine as she makes her debut; they may indeed reflect something of what Austen herself experienced in 1794 and 1797.
Gothic romances were exceedingly popular from about 1790 to 1820. They were highly imaginative escapist literature – ‘gothic’ in this context being taken to mean any historical period before 1700 and for preference as far back as medieval times, which by defi-nition could provide more scope for wild and barbaric behaviour than could the civilised eighteenth century. They were usually set in European locations, and specialised in plots involving mystery, crime and horror, with a strong element of the supernatural to add terror to the mix. So far from entering high society, the hero-ines in these romances invariably find themselves imprisoned in ruined castles or abbeys in the Alps or Pyrenees, and threatened by libertines, brigands and – apparently – ghosts. The nine chapters covering Catherine’s visit to Northanger Abbey parody her over-heated romantic imaginings of the potential mystery she expects to find there, by setting them against the realities of life in a wealthy, modernised country house in Gloucestershire. A final twist in the tale, however, is that, although Catherine’s initial imaginings are erroneous, there is indeed a mystery at Northanger Abbey, and she herself is at the centre of it.