In Defense of the Novel

            I agree with Catherine’s thought that it is difficult to determine when the narrator in Northanger Abbey is speaking, and when Austen is asserting her own opinions through her text. However, one point where I really see Austen herself coming through is in chapter five, when she discusses the generally negative opinion people held of the novel at that time. Catherine and Isabella read novels together – “Yes, novels” (58) (can you believe it?!), and the narrator rebukes other authors of the time for “degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding” (58). This comment is clearly deeply personal to Austen: her snarky tone suggests that she has some level of investment in the idea, and also, she writes novels – like this one! I don’t see any way we could separate Austen from her narrator here. That sentiment is reinforced on the next page, where Austen writes that, “there seems almost a general with of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them” (59). This comment is even more immediately personal for Austen, as it concerns not only the novel as a product, but the novelist as a person. Many of the other criticisms in the novel (those about Isabella’s behavior and the value of friendship, for example) could be more ambiguous in terms of whether or not they are Austen’s direct opinions. However, it seems that these thoughts on the practice of writing novels must necessarily be the author’s own. Acknowledging this complicates the rest of the novel: if Austen is asserting her actual philosophy here, isn’t it likely that she’s using her own voice (as opposed to the narrator’s) elsewhere, too? Perhaps. Either way I generally agree with her, but especially with her declaration that the novel is “only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language” (60). Well said, Miss Austen.