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A review by toggle_fow
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
4.0
This was a quick, cute read! Seems kind of wrong to say that about Jane Austen, but it was.
Catherine is a sheltered young woman traveling to Bath for the first time with family friends. She is naïve, artless, sincere, and (as the narrator takes great pains to impress upon us) of no particular outstanding or interesting character.
What she lacks in real-life experience, Catherine makes up by having read a great many Gothic romances. This, while woven into the entire structure of the prose, doesn't become REALLY important until the second half, when she goes to stay at the abbey with the Tilneys. The first half of the book is the trials and tribulations of Bath, where Catherine makes friends. (Or DOES she?)
I must say, I did like Catherine as a character. She's very young, but that's almost her only real fault. It took her one time of being shanghai'd against her will to cotton on to Isabella & Co.'s manipulative coercion, and then the second time she physically struggled and ran away from them when they were trying to manhandle her. Well done, Catherine! She's taken in by Isabella, the snake, but later on learns the truth of her character and doesn't hesitate to accept it right away. When she is letting her imagination run away with her, all it takes is a fairly brief 'girl, please get ahold of yourself' from Mr. Tilney to instantly and finally return her to common sense.
I also like Mr. Tilney pretty well! He's very funny and will go on for paragraphs with his skits, but he's smart too and kind and loves his sister. The paragraph where the narrator remarks on a naïve girl with little education being almost guaranteed to attract a clever man was pretty on the nose.
The whole thing did seem very abbreviated. Catherine's stay at the abbey came crashing down, and then hardly a chapter later the whole thing was explained and neatly tied up with a happy ending. It seemed like the kind of thing one of the other Austen books would have taken a lot longer to resolve. In addition, it was unkind of the narrator to tease us with Miss Tilney's happy ending and refuse to explain it! Honestly, Miss Tilney's plight at home was a wrenching one, and I would have been quite happy to read another entire book about how she broke free.
Overall, quite an enjoyable experience.
Catherine is a sheltered young woman traveling to Bath for the first time with family friends. She is naïve, artless, sincere, and (as the narrator takes great pains to impress upon us) of no particular outstanding or interesting character.
What she lacks in real-life experience, Catherine makes up by having read a great many Gothic romances. This, while woven into the entire structure of the prose, doesn't become REALLY important until the second half, when she goes to stay at the abbey with the Tilneys. The first half of the book is the trials and tribulations of Bath, where Catherine makes friends. (Or DOES she?)
I must say, I did like Catherine as a character. She's very young, but that's almost her only real fault. It took her one time of being shanghai'd against her will to cotton on to Isabella & Co.'s manipulative coercion, and then the second time she physically struggled and ran away from them when they were trying to manhandle her. Well done, Catherine! She's taken in by Isabella, the snake, but later on learns the truth of her character and doesn't hesitate to accept it right away. When she is letting her imagination run away with her, all it takes is a fairly brief 'girl, please get ahold of yourself' from Mr. Tilney to instantly and finally return her to common sense.
I also like Mr. Tilney pretty well! He's very funny and will go on for paragraphs with his skits, but he's smart too and kind and loves his sister. The paragraph where the narrator remarks on a naïve girl with little education being almost guaranteed to attract a clever man was pretty on the nose.
The whole thing did seem very abbreviated. Catherine's stay at the abbey came crashing down, and then hardly a chapter later the whole thing was explained and neatly tied up with a happy ending. It seemed like the kind of thing one of the other Austen books would have taken a lot longer to resolve. In addition, it was unkind of the narrator to tease us with Miss Tilney's happy ending and refuse to explain it! Honestly, Miss Tilney's plight at home was a wrenching one, and I would have been quite happy to read another entire book about how she broke free.
Overall, quite an enjoyable experience.