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"Northanger is not more than half my home; I have an establishment at my own house in Woodston, which is nearly twenty miles from my father's, and some of my time is necessarily spent there." "How sorry you must be for that!" "I am always sorry to leave Eleanor." "Yes; but besides your affection for her, you must be so fond of the abbey!
If Miss Austen was not equally impressed by the power of these romances, we rejoice that they were written, as with them we should have lost "Northanger Abbey." For ourselves, we spent one very rainy day in the streets of Bath, looking up every nook and corner familiar in the adventures of Catherine, and time, not faith, failed, for a visit to Northanger itself.
She remembered with what feelings she had prepared for a knowledge of Northanger. She saw that the infatuation had been created, the mischief settled, long before her quitting Bath, and it seemed as if the whole might be traced to the influence of that sort of reading which she had there indulged. Charming as were all Mrs.
Soon after this, the general found himself obliged to go to London for a week; and he left Northanger earnestly regretting that any necessity should rob him even for an hour of Miss Morland's company, and anxiously recommending the study of her comfort and amusement to his children as their chief object in his absence.
Her father having from old age resigned Steventon when Jane was six and twenty, she afterwards lived for a time with her family at Bath, a great watering-place, and the scene of the first part of "Northanger Abbey;" at Lyme, a pretty little sea-bathing place on the coast of Dorset, on the "Cobb" of which takes place the catastrophe of "Persuasion;" and at Southampton, now a great port, then a special seat of gentility.
A simpler solution is probably that, of the three novels she had written or sketched by 1811, Pride and Prejudice was languishing under the stigma of having been refused by one bookseller without the formality of inspection, while Northanger Abbey was lying perdu in another bookseller's drawer at Bath.
Henry and Eleanor, perceiving nothing in her situation likely to engage their father's particular respect, had seen with astonishment the suddenness, continuance, and extent of his attention; and though latterly, from some hints which had accompanied an almost positive command to his son of doing everything in his power to attach her, Henry was convinced of his father's believing it to be an advantageous connection, it was not till the late explanation at Northanger that they had the smallest idea of the false calculations which had hurried him on.
At last, however, the door was closed upon the three females, and they set off at the sober pace in which the handsome, highly fed four horses of a gentleman usually perform a journey of thirty miles: such was the distance of Northanger from Bath, to be now divided into two equal stages.
To what kind of fiction was her work opposed? In what does the charm of her novels consist? Do Jane Austen's characters have to be explained by the author, or do they explain themselves? Which method calls for the greater literary skill? What does Jane Austen say about Mrs. Radcliffe, in Northanger Abbey? Does she make any other observations on eighteenth-century novelists?
But so low did the building stand, that she found herself passing through the great gates of the lodge into the very grounds of Northanger, without having discerned even an antique chimney. She knew not that she had any right to be surprised, but there was a something in this mode of approach which she certainly had not expected.
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