Book Review: The Annotated Northanger Abbey

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Northanger Abbey: An Annotated Editionannotated northanger abbey coverBy Jane Austen, edited by Susan J. WolfsonHarvard University Press, 2014 The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press continues its stellar collection of gorgeous, oversized editions with a new annotated version of Jane Austen’s 1817 novel Northanger Abbey. Princeton University English professor Susan Wolfson does the annotating honors this time, filling page after page with her lively and freakishly comprehensive marginalia. The usual qualms about annotated editions in general still apply here – it feels like editorial overkill sometimes, especially with novels as blazingly approachable as those of Jane Austen – but the book is big and utterly beautiful, and Wolfson heroically refrains from the customary annotator’s mania; she spends no time patiently, exhaustively explaining to her readers what food is, or the sun is.Her Introduction is fast-paced and insightful. Describing the standard story of how Jane Austen wrote the first draft of the book that would later become Northanger Abbey in the mid-1790s, when she was a girl in her twenties, Wolfson does such a good job talking about the novel that you immediately wish she’d taken a lot more space to do it:

It was a brilliant undertaking, especially for someone in her early twenties. Topical, parodic, stylistically experimental, it took the pulse of the most popular genre of the decade, the gothic novel, crossing its conventions with another popular genre, the sentimental romance (a young woman’s course toward a good marriage). This was also Austen’s first sustained venture – in effect, a technical breakthrough – in what would become her signature mode: a narrative voice of seeming omniscient wit about social manners and fashions moral commonplaces, and the constraints on women’s lives in a patriarchal world.

The story of moonish, Gothic romance-addicted Catherine Morland going to visit the country estate of the Tilney family, Northanger Abbey is, Wolfson writes, “an odd repository of strange, uneven power. Spanning twenty years, it is the earliest drafted, longest gestated, last published of Austen’s completed novels,” and she zeroes in quite easily on the most casually charming aspect of the book:

Northanger Abbey is rife with books, reading matter and readers; allusions to poems, plays, novels, and fables; two letters set unmediated in the text for our perusal; an extended inset gothic entertainment … all situated in a world in which everything beckons as an interpretable text: conversations and behaviors, carriages and vistas.

And the quality of the annotations themselves is universally excellent. Wolfson not only provides all the little factual saves newcomers to Jane Austen will sometimes need, she’s also pick out interesting strands of echo and allusion. No matter how many times you’ve read Northanger Abbey, Wolfson will teach you something, and many of the connections she draws are fascinating. She can take a brief passage like this one:

They passed briskly down Pulteney-street, ad through Luara-place, without the exchange of many words. Thorpe talked to his horse, and she meditated, by turns, on broken promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trap-doors.

And read it in some strong or supple way I’d never thought of before; “Austen had fun with these counterpointed nouns,” she writes about this quick passage, “with turns that smartly mimic the way Pope’s heroic couplets bring incongruent entities into parodic relation, often with the punctuation or repetition and alliteration, as here.” Gems like that fill this hefty volume.Northanger Abbey, published posthumously, is the weakest of Jane Austen’s novels; I consider it to be a fairly obvious forgery on the part of her brother Henry and her sister Cassandra.  But it’s been filmed by the BBC, and it’s beloved by the overwhelming majority of Janeites, and now it’s got an iconic Belknap Annotated volume to carry it a long way into a new century. We’re in debt to Susan Wolfson, grabby Hampshire siblings or no.