Bath And Northanger Abbey's Composition And Sale

By Author: Water Henry
Total Articles: 73
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The connection my argument makes between Northanger Abbey plot and its astonishing precision about Bath's history and urban landscape touches upon Links Of London Charms the work's composition and publication. Relative to the complex debates about Austen's others novels and their multiple bouts of revision, the history of Northanger Abbey's composition is fairly uncontroversial. Cassandra records in her memorandums of 1817 that 'North-hanger Abby was written about the years 98 & 99'and Deirdre Le Faye refines this period to, tentatively, August 1798 to June 1799.7 These dates roughly coincide with Austen's recorded visits to Bath in 1797 and, again in 1799 (other short visits may, some suggest, have occurred as early as 1794, or even 1790).

The Austen family had some relatives in Bath and eventually moved there as part of Mr Austen's retirement in 1801, taking up residence at No. Sydney Place. This is where, scholars agree, Jane Austen probably put the finishing touches to her manuscript which was initially called Susan. With regard to family, the young ...
... Jane Austen enjoyed a distant as well as immediate connection to Bath. Her mother's great uncle was James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, a near-contemporary of Ralph Allen's and co-sponsor of John Wood's Bath. Knowledge of her own family history already secures Austen's awareness of Ralph Allen, since the history of these two men overlaps a great deal. All scholars accept that the bulk of Northanger Abbey was written prior to 1803, when Austen first offered the manuscript for Links Of London Bracelets sale under the title of Susan. Then a full-time resident of Bath, the 27-year-old Austen received ￡10 for the copyright, saw the novel advertised as 'In Press' but never, to her dismay, saw it actually published.11 Her brother Henry bought back the original manuscript from Crosby and Co. She then altered her heroine's name to Catherine and penned a brief advertisement. This advertisement accompanied the novel when it was posthumously published under the still-different title of Northanger Abbey (scholars presume it to be Henry's and Cassandra's choice) in December 1817 (the cited date is 1818), six months after the author's death on 18 July 1817.

The consensus of scholarly opinion is that Austen, who was growing increasingly ill from the autumn of 1816 onwards, did not extensively revise her 1803 manuscript both because she lacked the time and because all the historical references in the final novel predate that year. The mapping of Austen's cartographic details reinforces this standard view, suggesting that Austen writes in the company of Bath as it looked to her in 1797 and 1799 and possibly slightly beyond through her first years of residence at Sydney Place from 1801 to 1803. To the extent that the novel's own physical and historical setting likely reflects the time of its composition, I agree with Marilyn Butler that ''Northanger Abbey is essentially a work of the late 1790s'.