Reconsidering The Place Of Northanger Abbey

By Author: peter
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Precise knowledge of Bath matters, of course, in Persuasion, too. In that novel, as Jocelyn Harris and Keiko Parker have pointed out, 'location matters, because the level of habitation in Bath calibrates neatly to rank'. 'Upwards', Parker and Harris both demonstrate, indicates social as well as topographical elevation in Persuasion. In that novel too, then, knowledge of the cartography of Bath is amply rewarded: Sir Walter looks down on Bath from almost the Juicy Couture Necklaces highest point in the city... The Crofts lodge in Gay Street, not so far enough down as to discourage Sir Walter and Elizabeth from visiting them, but not so high as to make their address a challenge. Sir Walter disdains Mrs. Smith for living in Westgate Buildings at the actual and symbolic low end of Bath.

Persuasion, as we know from the dating of the first draft, was begun on 8 August 1815, more than a decade after Austen left Bath to settle, eventually, at Chawton. There is no record of Austen ever having returned for a subsequent visit. Her memory and residual knowledge ...
... of Bath's topographical ups and downs in Persuasion are extraordinary a match, surely, for the spatial precision of Northanger Abbey. Even with prior knowledge of Persuasion's particulars, however, the cartographic precision of Northanger Abbey's setting as well as its time-specific context will likely take some by surprise. Its playful use of the transfer of the Allen inheritance in the 1790s makes the novel seem unexpectedly rooted in Bath's social events, as well as its spaces, at the turn of the century.

If Austen wrote her text between 1798 and 1803 with these bits of Allen family history in mind, what did she think upon rereading it in 1816, after Henry bought it back for her Did she fear that nearly a decade-and-a-half had erased from memory much of this historical context for even a reader from Bath She hints at this in the disclaimer she penned in 1816, which was to accompany the published text: some observation is necessary upon those parts of the work which thirteen years have made comparatively obsolete. The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes. Apparently this caveat alone was insufficient. She appears to have thought substantial revision essential, for after years of delay she did not forward it straight to her publisher (with this disclaimer attached) but in March of 1817 shelved the text once more: Miss Catherine is put upon the Shelve for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out but I have a something ready for publication, which may perhaps appear about a twelvemonth hence. It is short, about the length of Catherine.

'A something' else of similar length and similar precision about Bath, namely Persuasion, was deemed ready, while Catherine was, after all that time, still judged unripe. Thirteen Juicy Couture Watch years had made some 'parts' seem 'obsolete'. What parts What did she want to change I cannot shake off the notion that Austen may have failed to recognize how a lapse of so many years had actually expanded rather than narrowed the appeal of her 1803 manuscript. When she implies a need for substantial revision in 1816 and receives the manuscript in 1817, she may have acted on a fear that her youthful fidelity to events in the late 1790s needed updating. She was wrong. The fact that for 200 years her story has been read and enjoyed outside of the context of the Ralph Allen legacy proves as much. The loss of certain original historical events from cultural memory forced readers to generalise their interpretations and see how Austen addressed larger questions about genre and the Gothic. Like the story's heroine, readers just as Austen feared have been habitually blind to the interpretive significance of Bath's local landscape and the name of Allen in Northanger Abbey.