Book #51: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

After reading the Jane Austen Pocket Bible last week, it reminded me of how little I remember from Northanger Abbey, the only JA novel that I'd only read once and never revisited. I remember liking it a lot and laughing out loud at parts, but whenever I think about rereading Jane Austen, I want to read P&P or one of the more obvious novels and then I never get around to this one. So I checked it out from the library (my copy is still packed), and thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and remembering Catherine Morland and her funny travels.

The thing I love about Catherine is that she just seems like such a normal, cheerful girl. She isn't super intelligent or super accomplished or super beautiful, but she is very "good-natured"--as Henry Tilney observes--and she is not very dramatic or drawn to hysterics. I love how Austen is so funny about that--she points out all over the place how you might expect the heroine of a novel to be tossing and turning all night and not able to sleep because she is so caught up with thinking about her lover, but Catherine slept for nine solid hours and felt totally refreshed the next morning. Haha--I love how she is making fun of so many common things with novels at the time! I took a Gothic Romanticism class at BYU, actually, and we read The Mysteries of Udolpho, the main novel that Catherine is interested in while she's in Bath, and it is totally dramatic and filled with hidden skeletons and dark castles and dangerous situations. But Catherine's life is not like that, as she remembers after embarrassing herself by being overzealous in her imaginings about what life is going to be like visiting a big castle of her friends'. I love that she also gets Henry to fall in love with her by just being herself, and by loving him openly so that he knows how she likes him.

I think it would be so fun to write a modern revision of Northanger Abbey, by the way, especially throwing in all of Austen's asides about how dramatic people are sometimes and comparing it to modern life. Maybe someday I'll feel creative enough.