Northanger Abbey - Book 47

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen is a delightful novel.  I know I have read it several times before but I can't remember the last time I actually did read it.  It's been a while.  My husband and I are reading through all the Austen novels together.  He's actually still ahead of me.  I thought he was giving up after Northanger Abbey but he has pushed on with Persuasion.  However, I am committed to reading A Cricket on the Hearth first for my Literary Christmas Challenge.

I love Austen's tongue in cheek tone and the wonderfully likable characters of our heroine, Catherine Morland and our hero, Henry Tilney.   It really is a novel about perception.  I think only Henry really has an accurate understanding of everyone's motives and personalities.  Yet in spite of being grounded in realism, he is not cynical, but a decent man with a witty sense of humor.  There's nothing not to like about him!

Poor Catherine pretty much gets everything wrong, except she does have a strong moral compass which helps her through the cognitive dissonance she experiences when people she trusts say one thing and do another.  She assumes everyone's good will and they take advantage of that.  She also lets her imagination run away with her and color her understanding of situations.  The characters of the Thorpe brother and sister team, John and Isabella, are so laughably odious.  They are like the stupider version of Mary and Henry Crawford from Mansfield Park.  And even an intimidating and reputable man of General Tilney's standing gets duped because of his preoccupation with money.

This is Catherine's first time away from home.  Her eyes are opened to the manipulations, cruelty and insolence of others.  She recognizes the flaws of her own characters.  But she also recognizes her soul mate in Henry and a true friend in his sister, Eleanor. And as Austen so cheekily notes at the end, through all the frustrations and painful occurrences of their meeting and courtship, it only is a twelvemonth from their first meeting until their wedding, so dear reader, it really isn't at all like those Gothic romances of yore.

All through this book though I kept wondering why Austen spelled Elinor one way in Sense and Sensibility and another way in Northanger Abbey?  For some reason that jumped out at me!

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