Northanger Abbey, French fiction, and the affecting history of the Duchess of C***

Abstract

Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps human nature, at least in midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and South of France might be as fruitful in as they were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded northern and western extremities. (205) WITH THESE WORDS, towards end of Abbey, Jane Austen's ironic narrator situates heroine, Catherine Morland, firmly in midland counties of England, unable to comment on extremities of her own country, let alone horrors of Continent. Like her heroine and her narrator, Jane Austen frequently claims restricted field for herself--the two inches of ivory on which she paints with so fine brush is perhaps most paraphrased and quoted line from her letters (16 December 1816). In terms of her reading, Austen famously points out she is a Woman, who ... knows only her Mother-tongue & has read very little in that (11 December 1815). Careful readers of both Austen's novels and her letters know, however, not to trust her when she is at her most self-deprecating. In her fiction, Jane Austen does not have geographical range of Ann Radcliffe: although Austen's juvenilia contains characters who both travel and claim most exotic of ancestries, six novels published during and immediately after her lifetime narrow their focus to southern counties of England author was most familiar with. Her satirical Plan of Novel, according to hints from various quarters, which, as Kathryn Sutherland writes, clearly dates from period of Austen's correspondence with James Stanier Clarke, gives short shrift to families in novels who are no sooner settled in one Country of Europe than they are necessitated to quit it & retire to another. In life, Austen was certainly less well travelled than Maria Edgeworth: this popular novelist made two lengthy trips to both France and Switzerland in early nineteenth century. In terms of her reading, however, Austen was like her contemporaries: she had access to, and was well aware of, European novels, including gothic novels. Austen uses this knowledge to great effect in Abbey when she depends on her reader's own familiarity with plot devices and stock characterization to achieve comic effects. Recent monographs by Mary Waldron and Anthony Mandal have done valuable work in situating Austen's writing within context of publishing market of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but neither pays sustained attention to popularity of translations in period. In similar vein, editors of recent Cambridge edition of Austen's Abbey, Barbara Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye, agree the parodic aspect of her text is likewise true reflection of her readings in contemporary (xxxii), but all examples they give are from novels in English, and indeed they claim Northanger Abbey belongs squarely in tradition of English novel established in middle of eighteenth century by Richardson and Fielding (xxxiii). I want to suggest Austen's adventures in contemporary fiction were broader than most critics have admitted and she was responding to some themes were imported into England from French sentimental and gothic novel. April Alliston is one of few commentators to have argued Austen began her career as novelist by expressly situating herself within literary correspondence among French and English women authors grew through appropriation of both discursive and social elements of preciosite by late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English novelists (32). …