Funbruary: “Northanger Abbey” by Jane Austen

Not much unlike Emma Woodhouse we have presumed what everyone would like to be delighted with this Funbruary - Jane Austen!

As fun is the watchword we decided on “Northanger Abbey”!

What better for a book club than a novel about novels!
“Northanger Abbey” is deriving much of its energy and humor from mocking the tropes of the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century— Austen wrote it in reaction to the hugely popular and highly sensational gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and her imitators, books that dominated the circulating libraries of England in the late eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries. And yet, despite its somewhat broad satire of the effect of novel-reading on a mind like Catherine’s, “Northanger” is no churlish attack on the novel. It’s not even an attack on the gothic novel. It is, rather, a rebuttal to such critiques, albeit one so elegant, and so conversant in the various arguments against the novel and its readers, that its radicalness has often passed unnoticed.