Northanger Abbey, which was entirely new to me, is a mere bauble compared to Jane Austen’s later works. In her intro to the PBS adaptation Sunday, a thoroughly Anglified Jillian Anderson pointed to its being Austen’s first novel, written at 23 and sold to a publisher for ten pounds — and promptly put on a shelf.
Austen seemed to intend it to be a send-up of the overwrought Gothic novels that were so popular in her day (and that she undoubtedly read). But it so clearly establishes the themes of Austen’s later works: romantic love, duty to one’s family, class structure and the myriad entanglements of money. Young Catherine may be confused about everyone’s motives, but we aren’t, or shouldn’t be: Income is all.
As Stephanie Cootnz reminds us here, romantic love as a basis for marriage is a recent phenomenon:
Marriage became the main way that the upper classes consolidated wealth, forged military coalitions, finalized peace treaties, and bolstered claims to social status or political authority. Getting “well-connected” in-laws was a preoccupation of the middle classes as well, while the dowry a man received at marriage was often the biggest economic stake he would acquire before his parents died…Until the late 18th century, parents took for granted their right to arrange their children’s marriages and even, in many regions, to dissolve a marriage made without their permission.
I used to accuse my mother of paying my husband to marry me. (They both denied it.) Two hundred years ago, it wouldn’t have been very strange.