In Defence of the Novel?

Dr Hudson

Jane Austen appears on the new ten-pound note with the quotation, ‘I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading’ emblazoned beneath her picture.

The line comes from Pride and Prejudice and is – as many commentators have pointed out – spoken by a character who is merely pretending, and actually has no interest in reading at all. We might look to another of her works, Northanger Abbey, only published after her death but written early in her career, to see a more detailed discussion of novels and reading.

Novels were relatively new (hence the name) in Austen’s time but nevertheless there were several kinds. Gothic horrors, by such writers as Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, were very popular, often absurd tales of mystery and terror. Romantic fiction, in which young women met and fell for unsuitable young men, was abundant.

In Northanger Abbey, the main character, Catherine Morland, is tutored in ‘all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives’ including some from the poet, Thomson and others from Shakespeare. But while her preferred reading in fiction is for ‘all story and no reflection’, the influence of her mother has exposed her largely to such morally uplifting, and outdated, books as those by Samuel Richardson. Early in the story, Catherine meets Isabella Thorpe, who is appalled by the very notion of Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, a book she deems ‘unreadable’; she introduces Catherine to The Mysteries of Udolpho, a gothic horror by Radcliffe. She then has a long list of further terrors to thrill our heroine, although there is a strong implication that Isabella herself has not actually read most of them.

Prior to this initiation, there has been little to suggest that Catherine's behaviour might have been detrimentally influenced by her reading. On the contrary, Austen has been at pains to demonstrate how very unlike the archetypal central female figure of fiction she is. She is introduced as both the heroine of the book and the antithesis of the traditional heroine, making a powerful ironic distance between the unreal world of popular literature and the ‘real’ world of Austen's novel: ‘No-one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine.’ At least to begin with, we are told, Catherine Morland is unlike the romantic stereotype, she is a creature of flesh and blood, who in her childhood behaved as a child might, and as a teenager is by no means a prodigy of artistic achievement. Her early years, spent largely in the company of her older brothers, have produced a relatively unaccomplished, ‘almost pretty’ adolescent, who has yet to meet a man likely to arouse romantic feelings in her. She has had no close female friends, either, and with her unmusical, unskilled unworldliness she is like the tabula rasa of John Locke, an embodiment of Rousseau's unfallen state of innocence.

Thus, when she travels to Bath, her mother has no anxiety about the dangers of ‘such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing young ladies’, no promise is begged from her sister to write absurdly detailed letters, no fortune is handed over to her by her father, (the stereotypical behaviour of characters in romantic fiction) but instead there are only ‘the common feelings of common life.’ But exposure to the character in the book who does conform to the stereotype, the afore-mentioned Isabella Thorpe, corrupts Catherine's previously natural response to life. It is from the moment of their meeting that she begins to fulfil the behavioural expectations of the novelistic heroine: ‘They called each other by their Christian name, were always arm in arm when they walked, pinned up each other's train for the dance, and were not to be divided in the set; and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting, in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up to read novels together.’

It is at this point that Jane Austen appends her famous defence of novels, berating those who criticise the form, ‘undervaluing the labour of the novelist.’ Rather, she tells us, we will find in novels, ‘the greatest powers of the mind…the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its vanities, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour…’ Never mind Homer, Virgil, Horace, we are to understand, never mind Shakespeare; apparently we should look to Richardson, Radcliffe, or another popular author of such conventional tales, Frances Burney, for the ‘most thorough knowledge of human nature.’ Can there be any doubt about Austen's satiric intention at this point? Is she seriously suggesting that in what at the time she wrote was a fledgling form ‘the liveliest effusions of wit and humour’ can be found? Or the truth about ‘human nature’? Or perhaps, as elsewhere, there is an ironic distance between her apparent meaning and our anticipated understanding?

It is often pointed out in justification of a literal understanding of this passage that a similarly spirited defence of the novel comes from Henry Tilney during the walk around Beechen Cliff: ‘The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.’ Henry claims to have read ‘all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and most of them with great pleasure.’ But this is an example of informed discernment which distinguishes him from the ignorance of John Thorpe, pretending to a knowledge he does not have, or Isabella, recommending books she has not read. Furthermore, it is difficult to know exactly how much of Henry's ironic banter is intended to be taken seriously: he speaks of having read ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of novels, surely an exaggeration, and of having ‘entered on my studies [of novels] at Oxford’, clearly a joke at the expense of idle students. Later in the same sequence he remarks that women ‘never use more than half’ their intelligence, which is unlikely to be Jane Austen's personal attitude. Must we suppose, then, that he is either serious or to be believed when he defends the novel?

In fact, when Catherine visits him at home in the titular Northanger Abbey, she constructs an elaborate and misguided Gothic fantasy about his family and his reaction to this points us in the direction we can assume the author intends us to follow: ‘What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that you are English, that we are Christians.’ And to add emphasis, the narrator herself reiterates the point in the following chapter, in which ‘the visions of romance were over’ and the scales have finally fallen from Catherine's eyes: ‘Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for.’ She looked for Gothic horror in the Abbey, but what she found was ‘human nature’ – the horrible behaviour of Henry’s father, General Tilney. Catherine becomes aware of the cause of her own downfall: ‘a craving to be frightened…created…long before her quitting Bath, and it seemed as if the whole might be traced to the influence of the sort of reading which she had there indulged.’ Books are to be blamed, if they lead one to miss the truth about people.

This insistence upon the importance of human nature occurs a third and final time in the novel, when Henry compliments Catherine for having returned to her senses at Northanger Abbey. He constructs an elaborate parody of her reactions to learning the truth about Isabella: ‘You feel a void in your heart which nothing else can occupy, etc.’ to which she responds with some surprise, ‘No, I do not.’ Henry approvingly comments, ‘You feel, as you always do, what is most to the credit of human nature. Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.’

It is an error, Austen is telling us, to rely upon the wrong models for advice as to how to conduct our relations with the world; in life we should not imitate art, but by the same token, art has a responsibility to be truthful to life. The General is not, of course, an adamantine-hearted wife-murderer, but he is a cruel, tyrannical father who keeps his adult children in awe, and who behaves appallingly when he discovers Catherine's true financial situation. Although the unfounded fears that kept her awake on her first arrival at the Abbey no longer trouble Catherine, the genuine unpleasantness of the General's inexplicable sudden change from hospitality and friendship to rudeness and apparent hatred makes sleep impossible for her: ‘and though the wind was high, and often produced strange and sudden noises throughout the house, she heard it all as she lay awake, hour after hour, without curiosity or terror.’ Gothic spectres are unreal, but the world holds real pain, real horrors, actually far more distressing than the frisson of false sentiment or imaginary intrigue: ‘mournfully superior in reality and substance.’

Jane Austen parodies both predominant elements of eighteenth-century fiction, the sensational and the over-sensitive in Northanger Abbey and by doing so draws attention to the folly of behaving as if in a novel. Less forcefully made, this theme had already appeared in Sheridan's 1775 play, The Rivals, in which Lydia Languish, in thrall to sentimental novels borrowed in heaps from Bath's circulating library, prefers the imaginary pauper, Ensign Beverly, to the unknown but wealthy Captain Absolute, unaware that they are in fact one and the same man. Her ‘very singular taste’ is apparently a direct result of her reading: ‘Madam,’ says Sir Anthony Absolute, the hero's father, ‘a circulating library in a town is, as an ever-green tree, of diabolical knowledge! - It blossoms through the year! - And depend upon it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last.’ Furthermore, Austen herself had parodied Richardson's lachrymose letter-writers in her early attempt at a novel, Love and Freindship (traditionally misspelled as in her youthful journal), in which letters from self-appointed heroine, Laura, betray her crushing egotism.

It is partly in the same spirit of burlesque that she must shortly thereafter have begun writing Susan, eventually to become Northanger Abbey, and in this, arguably the first of her six complete novels, we hear for the first time Jane Austen's characteristic ironic tone in its fully-developed form. Catherine is initially shown to be distant from the archetypal fictional heroine but through contamination by popular novels which do not reflect human nature as it really is, she begins to behave as if she were one. Beyond simple parody, Austen delivers a powerful satirical attack on the potentially pernicious influence of the novel, a form essentially developed over the previous half-century; and at the same time she sets out its proper agenda: accurately to represent the experiences and genuine vicissitudes of three-dimensional human beings. It was a target she was admirably to achieve in her own body of work.