Long Walks Through the World Wednesday

[evelyn_b]

What I've Just Finished Reading

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen! It's so good. It's a lot less intense than Persuasion -- Catherine's younger than Anne Elliot, and her anxieties and frustrations and hopes are much more youthful and less heartwrenching -- but it has the same mix of clear-eyed detachment and close emotional engagement that made

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[lost_spook]

The thing about Northanger Abbey is that it was actually the earliest of Jane Austen's novels to be published and you can tell the difference. (She did tweak it quite a bit, but not the same complete rewrite as she did with S&S and P&P when developing them into the forms we now know). And Persuasion, of course, is her last.

NA has much more of the tone of her juvenilia left in it. I once had the good fortune to pick up a copy of the Penguin Classics edition of The Juvenilia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte and while those are two things that are very much not the same things, Jane Austen's amazing teenage crack parodies she wrote for her family are quite something. (Love and Freindship is the most developed - it has two heroines who are so sensitive and noble that they have to keep stealing things and when they get upset they faint alternately into each other's arms.) And while NA has more depth, that same humour is still present - well, it is in the others, too, but less prominently.

(Btw, my reading icon here that was made by somebody talented, I forget who, but not me, is from the adorable ITV 2007 Northanger Abbey. I mention this because when and if you ever do get the time to watch all the adapatations of everything ever, a fair rule is usually to go for BBC and not ITV, but Northanger Abbey is a rare exception. :-D)

[evelyn_b]

It definitely feels like NA has one foot in the juvenilia! The other bookstore (sad small-town version of Barnes & Noble) has Love and Freindship bundled with some other juvenilia, but I haven't bought it yet because it's four times as expensive as these cheap novel paperbacks (Signet Classics, with excruciatingly boring cover designs).

The only Jane Austen adaptation I've seen is the 1995 miniseries with Jennifer Ehle, which my entire family loves. But one day I'll watch Northanger Abbey.