The story agrees with the first paragraph. With the exception of “Pride and Prejudice,” “Northanger Abbey”—another of Jane Austen’s earlier novels—is the most purely humorous and satirical of the whole.
At fifteen, appearances are mending with Catherine. She begins to curl her hair, and long for balls. Her complexion improves, her features are softened by plumpness and colour, her eyes gain more animation, her figure more consequence, and from fifteen to seventeen her mind is in training for a heroine. She reads—in addition to the stories which had formerly constituted all her voluntary reading—such books as Jane Austen tells us, in her merry mockery, heroines must read in order to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives. Catherine studies Pope and Gray, Thomson and Shakespeare. Can Catherine’s sisters, in these days of much cramming and innumerable pursuits, bring forward even so respectable a list of authors with whom the young readers are intimately acquainted?
In drawing[19] Catherine is most wanting. Though she cannot write sonnets, she can read them; though there seems no chance of her throwing a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the piano, of her own composition, she can listen to other people’s performances with very little fatigue. But she has not even sufficient command of the pencil to attempt a sketch of her lover’s profile, that she may be detected in the design. She is not so conscious of the deficiency in the meantime, since she has reached the age of seventeen without the suspicion of a lover. Her biographer accounts for the blank in that bantering tone she assumes:—“There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no, not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door; not one young man whose origin was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no children.”
But the perverseness of forty families cannot interfere with the destiny of a young lady who is to be a heroine: the wind will blow a hero to her.
Mr. Allen, the principal squire in Mr. Morland’s Wiltshire parish of Fullerton, is ordered to Bath for the benefit of a gouty constitution; and his wife, a good-humoured woman, fond of Miss Morland, and probably aware that, if adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad, invites the happy Catherine to accompany her.
Catherine was in luck, for Bath was the queen of the old watering-places; and a popular English watering-place at the close of the last century was a centre of bustle and gaiety, just as a country village was apt to be sunk in obscurity.
Before beginning Catherine’s Bath career, Jane Austen suddenly lapses into seriousness for a moment, to tell her readers—lest they should ever have doubted it—that this young Catherine, going out into the world to meet her fortune, has an affectionate heart, her disposition is cheerful and open—without conceit or affectation of any kind, her manners are just removed from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl, her person is pleasing, and when in good looks pretty. Here the author’s not very lavish indulgence to her heroine collapses—“and her mind,” the sentence ends, is “about as ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is.”
How old was the judge who made this sweeping, though good-humouredly disdainful estimate of the mental acquirements of her companions? Just five or six years older. Jane Austen had not quite attained the venerable age of twenty-three when she uttered this severe reflection.
Compared to some of Jane Austen’s other heroines, Catherine Morland has none of the astuteness and brilliance of Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, the delicate intuitions of Fanny Price, or the gentle, womanly wisdom of Anne Elliot. Catherine is a simple, single-hearted girl who, in her guilelessness and ignorance of the world, falls into mistakes impossible for the others. But she does not lack judgment, which one feels will ripen with her years. Above all, she is like every one of her author’s heroines, right-minded and wholesome-hearted. At the same time she is a genuinely girlish girl, as much carried away by her feelings and her imagination as the most foolish of good girls can be; but withal we always recognise in her the possibilities of a sensible as well as an amiable woman.
The witty banter on the author’s part is soon resumed. At parting, Mrs. Morland, in place of solemnly warning her daughter against the noblemen and baronets who were in the habit of cozening away young ladies to remote farm-houses, simply bids her wrap herself warm about the throat when she comes from “the Rooms” at night, and try to keep an account of what money she spends.