Northhanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Yes, of course I've read Northanger Abbey before.  But I ran across an omnibus edition of Northanger Abbey that includes Lady Susan and Sanditon, and thought it might be interesting to read Jane Austen's juvenilia and unfinished last work, respectively.

I started with Northanger Abbey.

What struck me on this reading is how much Northanger Abbey reminded me of a Georgette Heyer novel.

Why?  The book focuses on a young heroine making her debut in the world, as so many Heyer books do, and Northanger Abbey takes place in Bath, the scene of so many Heyer novels. But the greatest similarity is that this is a light book, written to provide amusement.  The heroine of Northanger Abbey faces no life-altering stakes.  Her immediate happiness is very often at risk, as is her social comfort.  At one crisis point, she is humiliatingly embarrassed by her own lapse of judgement -- but she learns from it, and becomes closer to the friend who provides her with guidance.  Even the climax of the novel, where she is thrown out of the Tilbury's house and forced to make her own way home, unprotected and uncertain even of how to get there...passes without serious threat.  Catherine Morland makes her way safely back to her family. And just as in a Heyer novel, the climax of Northanger Abbey is quickly succeeded by our heroine's marriage to her worthy and much-loved suitor.

This lack of stakes is in sharp contrast to Austen's more mature works.  When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Mr. Collins, she is putting both her own future and the future of her sisters and mother at jeopardy. Elizabeth's only hope is a good marriage, but the neighbourhood has a paucity of eligible gentlemen and she and the other girls have only their looks and their characters to recommend them -- which is very little in a world where property is the primary requirement for belonging to the class that they were born into.  In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price lives as an undervalued poor relation -- but in much greater comfort and with much greater gentility than is possible for her mother and younger siblings, who suffer from their mother's improvident marriage.  Not to mention that the book features the utter ruination of Maria Norris, who marries for money but then falls into scandal when she afterwards falls for the fickle and irresponsible Henry Crawford.

Northanger Abbey is the book of a young woman, full of high spirits, who is amusing herself with her writings and aims to amuse her readers too.  The book not infrequently "breaks the fourth wall" when the author speaks directly to her readers with asides about the value of novels, or the happy fate of her protagonist.

Heyer doesn't explicitly do the amusing asides -- although she delights in showing her characters in a charming and yes, amusing light -- but almost all of her books very much feel like this one.

Comparing Austen to Heyer is of course absurd -- Heyer wrote in imitation of Austen.  But after re-reading Northanger Abbey, it seems that in particular Heyer wrote in imitation of Northanger Abbey, as well as in imitation of the types of melodrama that Austen satirizes here.