2 - Northanger Abbey And Sense And Sensibility

Summary

Walter Scott was reviewing Emma when he noted Jane Austen’s resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much modern fiction – ‘the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering-places and circulating libraries’ – and her commitment instead to close, nuanced representation of quotidian life. Yet it is in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, respectively the first of Austen’s novels to be accepted for publication and the first to be actually published, that the process Scott described is best observed. As well as showing the emergence of Austen’s own distinctive manner, these novels make clear that her relationship to the extravagant themes and overwrought conventions of fashionable genre fiction involved something more complex and interesting than outright rejection. Scott was right, of course, that Austen distances herself from escapist romance, and on some counts we might compare her stance with the contrarian aesthetic of William Wordsworth, whose 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads excoriates ‘frantic novels’ and the ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’ to which they catered, insisting instead that ‘the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants’. In Austen too, as in Wordsworth, we find a writer of great innovative power substituting new kinds of discipline and measure in place of hyperbole and excess, convinced that rhetorically less is artistically more. Yet Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility also display an exuberant immersion in, even a wry appreciation of, the nervy routines and tawdry formulas of circulating library fiction. In their close parodic attention to the Gothic novel and the novel of sensibility in particular, they show Austen’s engagement with the market-leading genres of fiction in her day – the fiction disparaged by Scott and denounced by Wordsworth – to be a matter of creative transformation, not fastidious recoil.