In this search she encounters Tilney, who has returned
unexpectedly from Woodston. He dissipates once and for all her
nervous fancies, and Catherine decides: "Among the Alps and
Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. There, such as
were not spotless as an angel, might have the dispositions of a
fiend. But in England it was not so."
Miss Austen's novel is something more than a mock-romance, and
Catherine is not a mere negative of the traditional heroine, but
a human and attractive girl, whose fortunes we follow with the
deepest interest. At the close, after Catherine's ignominious
journey home, we are back again in the cool world of reality. The
abbey is abandoned, after it has served its purpose in
disciplining the heroine, in favour of the unromantic country
parsonage.
In _Northanger Abbey_, Jane Austen had deftly turned the novels
of Mrs. Radcliffe to comedy; but, even if her parody had been
published in 1798, when we are assured that it was completed, her
satirical treatment was too quiet and subtle, too delicately
mischievous, to have disturbed seriously the popularity of the
novel of terror. We can imagine the Isabella Thorpes and Lydia
Bennets of the day dismissing _Northanger Abbey_ with a yawn as
"an amazing dull book," and returning with renewed zest to more
stimulating and "horrid" stories.
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