Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen

Fun fact: even though I live in downtown Ottawa (the national capital of Canada), I hate going to Parliament Hill for the Canada Day celebrations on July 1^st.  It’s usually too hot, too crowded, and the government department that plans the show on the Hill is apparently either high or grossly out of touch with the average Canadian.  So, in light of all this, I’ve developed my own Canada Day tradition; I generally read until 6pm-ish, then I’ll watch the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice.  Having just recently read P&P, I was inspired to pick up another Austen work, and settled on Northanger Abbey.

Northanger Abbey is the story of Catherine Morland.  Catherine, as might be expected from an Austen work, is a young woman on the look out for a husband she could love.  After accompanying a family friend to Bath, Catherine becomes fast friends with Isabelle and is introduced to her brother John; Bath is also where Catherine meets Mr. Tilney, and almost immediately falls in love.  However, John (who’s kind of a douche.  No, wait, he’s a douche), fancies himself as the prime contender for the roll of Catherine’s husband, and does what he can to upset the Catherine/Tilney apple cart.  In the mean time, Isabelle has fallen in love with James, Catherine’s brother, and accepts his proposal.  All this happens at Bath, but the climax and most of the dénouement of the novel happens at Northanger Abbey, the Tilney family home, where Catherine is invited to visit as Tilney’s sister’s friend.  It’s an Austen novel, so I’m sure you can guess the end, but there’s a minor twist in the climax of the story, so I won’t say any more here.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that this work had more of Austen’s innate sense of humour than my last Austen read, Mansfield Park.  Right off the bat, Austen opens with a tong-in-cheek assessment of her main character.  This frank and humourous bent continues throughout the entire work as Austen continues to introduce her other characters, who are in fact archetypes in the Austen/Georgian world; we have the pompous (John), the well-meaning (James), the dastardly character (Captain Tilney), and the true gentleman (Mr. Tilney), just to name a few.  Austen’s pen at once lambasts her characters and yet makes them all highly engaging, if not endearing.

While Austen is busy harpooning her characters, she’s also busy doing the same to herself as the author.  There are numerous passages where Austen mocks the contemporary novelist; this can distract from the plot, but it’s also quite telling of her own assessment of her chosen profession.  During my last year of undergrad, I wrote a seminar paper of the gender-dynamics of the Victorian author (of which Austen doesn’t quite fit, admittedly, with the time frame), and many of the complains and observations that Austen makes with her own words were supported with the research; novels were considered trite ways to pass time for uninformed women, novels gave women un-reasonable expectations of every-day life, and most damning of all, novels created in women an impression of the men in their lives that just weren’t reasonable.  Austen plays on all these criticisms with her characters, while also addressing them head-on.

So, final verdict.  Read this book.  It’s one of the few works that Austen left to the world, and it embodies so much of the classic Austen world-view that it’s worth the read.  While I’ve yet to find an Austen book that lives up to the Pride and Prejudice of it all, Northanger Abbey is a close second with its wit, characters, and self-awareness.  

Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen

I sometimes feel, as an educated woman, that my degree(s) came with an imperative to love Jane Austen’s works.  And, in certain cases, I do – Pride and Prejudice is amazing, Emma is pretty good, and the first half of Sense and Sensibility (that I read before life got in the way and I got distracted) has it’s charms.  So can someone please tell me where Mansfield Park fits into the larger Austen of it all?

Mansfield Park hits all the same notes of the rest of Austen’s works – it shines a light on society’s hypocrisy, it’s basis is an uncomfortable love story, and its has (at moments) an innate sense of humour that is all Austen.  But unlike her other works, Mansfield Park feels like a puzzle that was put together all wrong.

A word on plot: Fanny Price is born to one of three sisters, but the sister who married beneath her station and proceeded to have too many children to comfortably support; in order to help, Fanny’s aunts encourage her mother to send Fanny to live with them at Mansfield Park, the typical English country estate.  Fanny goes, and finds a prickly existence waiting for her – being in the unenviable position of a dependent, Fanny doesn’t seem to fit in either above or below stairs, and yet her aunts treat her as both an unwelcome burden and a domestic.  The rest of the family reflects, to some degree, this dynamic.  The exception is Edmund (and later his father), who takes Fanny under his wing and helps her adjust to her new family life.  The plot of Mansfield Park takes place at the time when Fanny’s two female cousins are looking for husbands, and new (and town-ified) visitors come to the area.  What ensues is the usual Austen back and forth between all parties as they try to sort out their feelings for each other and find a path forward that they can live with.

All of this exposition had so much promise.  I fully expected Fanny to be another Elizabeth Bennett (or even Emma) who, in a take-no-prisoners kind of way, was going to run the table and settle her own affairs to her satisfaction and no one else’s.  Fanny, however, is closer to milquetoast than a Bennett.  She is withdrawing, expects no better than how she is treated, and refuses to acknowledge even her own feelings in order to find an actionable way forward.  If anything, the typical Austen heroine is embodied in Mary Crawford, the vicar’s sister-in-law who visits the area; and yet, Miss Crawford is viewed by the reasonable elements in the story (Fanny and Edmund) as being too forward, too quick to speak, and too insensitive.  I suppose this could be said about Bennett and Emma, but that was part of their charm when contrasted against the stuffy, Georgian society they lived in.

In the end, I felt to emotional connection to Fanny – I didn’t care if she got the man of her dreams in the end, or if she sunk into obscurity as her social position seemed to dictate.  Where we do get a glimpse of the Austen I love so much in her other books is in the resolution of the fate of the other characters; there is a healthy dose of comeuppance, some redemption, and a bit of obscurity thrown in.  I found the conclusions of the stories of everyone but Fanny to be more interesting than that of the main character.

More than just my issues with the character/plot development is the writing style in Mansfield Park.  It is so slow in comparison to other works in the Austen catalogue; it feels like the first half-dozen chapters or so are given over the describing exposition, and describing it in such a way that drags.  This is a common issue I have with a lot of the ‘classical’ works, but had never before encountered in an Austen work.

I realize that there are probably English/Women’s Studies/History grad-students out there who can give me chapter and verse on why Mansfield Park is either the best or the worst or the outlier in Austen’s catalogue.  And that’s all well and good.  But coming to this novel as the casual (and not as an academic) reader, it doesn’t matter all that much to me – these are my impressions, and they are what they are.  So, final verdict?  If you want to read an Austen work, there are so many other, more engaging works to choose from; don’t saddle yourself with Mansfield Park.