Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen - Dorothy Scarborough (essay date 1917)

Dorothy Scarborough (essay date 1917)

SOURCE: "The Gothic Romance," in The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, 1917. Reprint by Octagon Books, 1967, pp. 6-53.

[In the following excerpt, Scarborough describes Northanger Abbey as a clever burlesque of the Gothic novel.]

Perhaps the most valuable contribution that the Gothic school made to English literature is Jane Austen's inimitable satire of it, Northanger Abbey. Though written as her first novel and sold in 1797, it did not appear till after her death, in 1818. Its purpose is to ridicule the Romanticists and the book in itself would justify the terroristic school, but she was ahead of her times, so the editor feared to publish it. In the meantime she wrote her other satires on society and won immortality for her work which might never have been begun save for her satiety of medieval romances. The title of the story itself is imitative, and the well-known...

[The entire page is 880 words long]

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