Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen - Jane Nardin (essay date 1973)

Jane Nardin (essay date 1973)

SOURCE: "Propriety and the Education of Catherine Morland: Northanger Abbey, " in Those Elegant Decorums: The Concept of Propriety in Jane Austen's Novels, State University of New York Press, 1973, pp. 62-81.

[In the following essay, Nardin discusses Catherine's education in the moral significance of social propriety.,]

Duckworth on Catherine's moral growth:

Northanger Abbey, while it does not reflect the same persistent awareness of an economically debased society, takes its own close look at the conditions of social existence. As well as being a response to the Gothic novel, it is, to borrow Malcolm Bradbury's phrase describing E. M. Forster's fiction, a "sociomoral" novel, and in her description of Catherine, Jane Austen, provides an early attempt at defining proper moral behavior in the face of a largely immoral world. In describing Catherine's...

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