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

Comments

[ramasi]

I hate novels explicitly (instead of indirectly) criticizing other types of novels or books, so even though Austen poking fun at gothic novels (and I have no real interest in gothic novels myself) seemed more affectionate than not, it sort of irritated me.
Other than that, while Northanger Abbey isn't my favourite, I liked it a lot. I thought all the characters were great, though I think Isabelle was my favourite; I've been wondering, is she completely calculating, or just opportunistic and maybe somewhat self-deluded? When she talks about how important friendship is to her, does she actually believe that about herself?

[evelyn_b]

Isabella is such a great character. I think she's almost perfectly self-deluded and hardly consciously calculating at all. I don't get the impression she's conscious of any discrepancy between her words and her actions; I think she genuinely believes that all her friendships are important to her; I think she also believes that she is wounded deeply when they end due to the tragic misunderstandings and surprising inconstancies she seems to keep running into for some reason among the people she befriends.

She wants to be someone to whom friendship is important, and she has decided that of course she is, she always has been. And because she is so affectionate and friendship is so important to her, she can't imagine that any action of hers could be calculating -- it's all just a terrible misunderstanding, and of course dear Catherine will understand, if her heart isn't made of stone

[ramasi]

I love this analysis! I guess to me it was less clear because a) who has this little self-awareness? and b) I guess Isabella's self-interest when she looks to marry looks obvious to me, but for her it's not so far from what's perfectly normal, so it makes sense that it wouldn't seem odd to her. I think for me it took Isabella's reaction to Catherine refusing her brother, when it appears important to her to stay friends with Catherine even if she breaks the engagement for me to lean towards "Isabella probably means all of it". Though the letter at the end made me wonder a bit again.

Anyway. I like what you say about novel-reading too. I do love how they all love these books, but still have pretty different relationships to them.

[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

[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.