Blast from the Past: When Jane Austen Went Bump in the Night

 

I am fond of the topic of this post, because I've always thought the Gothic novel craze was both fascinating and fun--enough so that I played with the genre in The Vanishing Volume, the second installment in The Ladies of Almack's series. Enjoy!

* * *

Jane Austen must have enjoyed a good laugh. How else could she have created Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Marianne from Sense and Sensibility, and today's topic, Northanger Abbey?

Much of the divine Jane's early work was outright comedic, written to amuse her family; she especially seemed to have enjoyed parody, gently making fun of existing works and genres (her A History of England, a parody of Oliver Goldsmith's book of the same name and dedicated to her sister Cassandra, is pure silliness.) We've discussed the Gothic novel craze as a brief thing of the past, a temporary blip on the history of the English novel...but Jane experienced it in real time. And just as there are people who find today's vampire craze amusing, it's pretty clear that Jane got a chuckle from Gothic novels.

Northanger Abbey, though not published till after her death in 1818, is one of Jane's earliest major works: a first draft, entitled Susan, was probably written in 1798 or 1799. It's also the most explicitly literary of her major novels in that it's very much a book about books. The story begins with the introduction of the heroine: "No one who had seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman...and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense...and instead of dying in bringing [her] into the world, as anyone might expect, she still lived on...."

Jane is poking fun here at the convention in Gothic novels that the heroine be perfect and either orphaned or subject to the whims of a parent who has suffered a clouded past which will of course rebound upon his or her hapless child. The book continues in this vein with frequent authorial intrusions to point out how boring and normal Catherine and her life are...much to Catherine's dismay, for she is a devotee of books "provided they were all story and no reflection." Poor Catherine, with a head full of stories and a life full of commonplaces, for "There was not one lord in their neighbourhood; not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintances who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door; not one young man whose origin was unknown....But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way."

Of course Catherine does find a hero while visiting Bath. Handsome Henry Tilney and his sister invite her to visit their country home, Northanger Abbey, and Catherine is in raptures at the thought: will it be infested with the ghosts of murdered monks and inhabited by ancient retainers who know all the awful secrets of the family they serve? Jane has a field day with Catherine's visit: the Abbey is no crumbling, battlemented ruin but a comfortable, modern house; a dusty scroll hidden in a strange Japanese cabinet turns out to be an old laundry list. But then poor Catherine does indeed get a fright when the Tilneys' father, hitherto almost fawningly nice to her, suddenly turns cold and declares her visit at an end. Catherine learns that being the heroine in a dramatic story isn't as much fun as she thought it would be, but all ends happily: Henry Tilney follows her home and proposes, explaining that his rather money-grubbing father had thought her an heiress, but is told (falsely) that she was a penniless adventuress. Papa is brought round when he learns that Catherine has a respectable dowry, and all live happily ever after.

Northanger Abbey is probably the most light-hearted of Jane's books, with even its central love story being something of a joke (Henry Tilney takes no real notice of Catherine until he realizes she admires him enormously: "in finding him irresistable, becoming so herself." Read it, and laugh along with its author across the centuries.

 

P.S. Amusingly, it was thought that Jane Austen had made up many of the titles of Gothic novels mentioned in Northanger Abbey, until some scholarly detective work in the 1920s revealed that they had all, indeed, been realio, trulio published works.

 

The Publisher That Went Bump in the Night

It’s October (also known as Pumpkin Spice Month 😛) and we are fast approaching Halloween and the spooky season, when people seem to enjoy a good scare. But as we’ve discussed before, liking a good scare isn’t solely a modern phenomenon: the nineteenth century equivalent of the slasher film was the Gothic novel. We’ve had some discussion of Gothic literature here on NineteenTeen in past years, but did you know that there was a whole publishing company devoted to publishing books that go bump in the night?

It was a dark and stormy night, and in an eldritch, dimly-lit chamber of cyclopean architecture whose angles were all wrong  (oops, sorry—I started parodying the wrong author) a certain London building at Cree Church-Lane, a handsome, flashing-eyed man brooded over his desk...

William Lane, born some time around 1745, began his career as a printer in London then opened a circulating library in 1774, becoming sufficiently successful to commence publishing books in the 1780s. He obviously kept a weather eye on what was selling well, and in the 1780s, what was selling well were books like The Castle of Otranto and The Old English Baron—works that allowed readers to be surprised, spooked, and titillated without ever leaving their comfortable chairs by the fireside.

So William began to include similar titles in his publishing list, which he now named the Minerva Press, moving his operations and circulating library around the corner to Leadenhall Street...and business took off. Calling his imprint the Minerva Press was a stroke of marketing genius: the name Minerva (the Roman goddess of wisdom) lent a certain respectability and a highbrow, classical veneer to the endeavor, though his books were firmly in the popular literature camp. And while his list included non-Gothic romance, earlier 18^th century fiction, and even some non-fiction, the Gothic novel is what Lane’s Minerva is remembered for.

Of course, he had his detractors. The quality of his books was derided; evidently, production values were not high...but that enabled him to sell his books much more cheaply (and in larger quantities.) And also of note was the fact that many of his most popular authors were women—Regina Maria Roche, Eleanor Sleath (whose books were among those recommended by Isabella Thorpe to Catherine Moreland in Northanger Abbey)*, and Eliza Parsons were among his top names. Though they did not make much money from selling books to Minerva Press because the profit margin was a slim one, multiple women authors got their toes in the publishing door through Minerva.

Business boomed through the 1790s, enough that the aging Lane took on partners to share the workload: John Darling and Anthony King Newman joined him in 1799 preparatory to his retirement in 1804, whereupon Newman took over Minerva Press. Newman continued to publish, though after Lane's death in 1814 and by 1820 the “Minerva Press” name had been retired in favor of “A.K. Newman & Co.”

So...are you wondering just how spooky some Minerva Press’s novels were? You need wonder no longer: Valancourt Press has reprinted dozens of Lane’s titles as well as a good helping of other Gothic fiction. You too can settle in a comfortable chair by a good fire, and be terrified most deliciously.

__________


*Amusingly, it was thought that Jane Austen had made up many of the titles of Gothic novels mentioned in Northanger Abbey, until some scholarly detective work in the 1920s revealed that they had all, indeed, been realio, trulio published works.
 

Books That Currently Go Bump in the Night

Thanks so much for your comments about Gothic novels! From Mysteries of Udolpho to Northanger Abbey, Frankenstein to Dracula, the nineteenth century was blessed with some awe-inspiring novels of terror, adventure, and romance.

And they inspired a whole slew of current novels too!

It’s no secret that Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice stands as the prototype for many a romantic hero. Now his story is being taken to a whole new level, blending with the terrifying, in no less than two novels! Mr. Darcy Vampyre by Amanda Grange was out this August from Sourcebooks. According to its publisher, the story “starts where Pride and Prejudice ends and introduces a dark family curse so perfectly that the result is a delightfully thrilling, spine-chilling, breathtaking read.” Sounds intriguing, eh? (Well, maybe to some of you. Full confession time—I overdosed on horror novels in the third grade, and I haven’t been able to force myself to read one since! I write YA, and I can’t convince myself to read Twilight.)

Regina Jeffer’s Vampire Darcy’s Desire, out from Ulysses Press just this month, also sees the dangerous Mr. Darcy as a vampire. The teaser is “Two lovers trying to overcome that which separates them: their pride, their prejudice, Darcy's vampirism and the evil workings of master vampire George Wickham.” Hm, maybe I might bite, er try this one.

But wait, there’s more!

Jane Austen’s novels seem to scream paranormal to a whole bunch of folks. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, anyone? No? What about Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters? I haven’t read either, but supposedly they are wildly popular. Not sure they’re my cup of tea, er blood, er sea water.





Still want more? The end of December, Ballantine will release Michael Thomas Ford’s Jane Bites Back. The teaser? “Two hundred years after her death, Jane Austen is still surrounded by the literature she loves—but now it's because she's the owner of Flyleaf Books in a sleepy college town in Upstate New York. Every day she watches her novels fly off the shelves—along with dozens of unauthorized sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations. Jane may be undead, but her books have taken on a life of their own.

"To make matters worse, the manuscript she finished just before being turned into a vampire has been rejected by publishers—116 times. Jane longs to let the world know who she is, but when a sudden twist of fate thrusts her back into the spotlight, she must hide her real identity—and fend off a dark man from her past while juggling two modern suitors. Will the inimitable Jane Austen be able to keep her cool in this comedy of manners, or will she show everyone what a woman with a sharp wit and an even sharper set of fangs can do?” Okay, you may get me to read this one!

If you truly want the feelings of a nineteenth century novel, with the spice of the Gothic, I definitely recommend Carrie Bebris’ series. In these the married Darcys take on paranormal mysteries. With such lovely titles as Pride and Prescience, Suspense and Sensibility, North by Northanger, and The Matters at Mansfield, you know Carrie has some of Jane Austen’s wit along with her own imagination and impressive writing skills.

Have you seen others? Or is there a Jane Austen character you’d love to see taken to Gothic extremes? Let us know, and happy Halloween!

Books That Go Bump in the Night, Part 5

And then there are the books that giggle in the night.

Jane Austen must have enjoyed a good laugh. How else could she have created Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Marianne from Sense and Sensibility, and today's topic, Northanger Abbey?

Much of the divine Jane's early work was outright comedic, written to amuse her family; she especially seemed to have enjoyed parody, gently making fun of existing works and genres (her A History of England, a parody of Oliver Goldsmith's book of the same name and dedicated to her sister Cassandra, is pure silliness.) We've discussed the Gothic novel craze as a brief thing of the past, a temporary blip on the history of the English novel...but Jane experienced it in real time. And just as there are people who find today's vampire craze amusing, it's pretty clear that Jane got a chuckle from Gothic novels.

Northanger Abbey, though not published till after her death in 1818, is one of Jane's earliest major works: a first draft, entitled Susan, was probably written in 1798 or 1799. It's also the most explicitly literary of her major novels in that it's very much a book about books. The story begins with the introduction of the heroine: "No one who had seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman...and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense...and instead of dying in bringing [her] into the world, as anyone might expect, she still lived on...."

Jane is poking fun here at the convention in Gothic novels that the heroine be perfect and either orphaned or subject to the whims of a parent who has suffered a clouded past which will of course rebound upon his or her hapless child. The book continues in this vein with frequent authorial intrusions to point out how boring and normal Catherine and her life are...much to Catherine's dismay, for she is a devotee of books "provided they were all story and no reflection." Poor Catherine, with a head full of stories and a life full of commonplaces, for "There was not one lord in their neighbourhood; not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintances who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door; not one young man whose origin was unknown....But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way."

Of course Catherine does find a hero while visiting Bath. Handsome Henry Tilney and his sister invite her to visit their country home, Northanger Abbey, and Catherine is in raptures at the thought: will it be infested with the ghosts of murdered monks and inhabited by ancient retainers who know all the awful secrets of the family they serve? Jane has a field day with Catherine's visit: the Abbey is no crumbling, battlemented ruin but a comfortable, modern house; a dusty scroll hidden in a strange Japanese cabinet turns out to be an old laundry list. But then poor Catherine does indeed get a fright when the Tilneys' father, hitherto almost fawningly nice to her, suddenly turns cold and declares her visit at an end. Catherine learns that being the heroine in a dramatic story isn't as much fun as she thought it would be, but all ends happily: Henry Tilney follows her home and proposes, explaining that his rather money-grubbing father had thought her an heiress, but is told (falsely) that she was a penniless adventuress. Papa is brought round when he learns that Catherine has a respectable dowry, and all live happily ever after.

Northanger Abbey is probably the most light-hearted of Jane's books, with even its central love story being something of a joke (Henry Tilney takes no real notice of Catherine until he realizes she admires him enormously: "in finding him irresistable, becoming so herself." Read it, and laugh along with its author across the centuries.

Books That Go Bump in the Night, Part 2

One of the most popular of the Gothic writers, long after her death, was Ann Radcliffe. Originally published in 1794, her Mysteries of Udolpho continued to be a bestseller, particularly among young ladies, throughout the nineteenth century in both England and America.

Born Ann Ward in 1766, she married William Radcliffe, a journalist and newspaper publisher, in Bath in 1788. Like her heroines, she was beautiful, quiet, and virtuous. She turned to writing for amusement and was amazed at her own success. She hated being in the limelight so much that, when she ventured to the opera with her husband, she sat in the pit rather than in a box so no one would recognize her.

But she understood that fine line between being terrified and being horrified. Because of her success, she inspired countless imitators, some of whom took their suspense stories like those she penned and added gruesome murders or detailed tortures.

But Ann drew the line at such things. She saw a huge difference between enjoying a good scare and being grossed out. “Terror and horror,” she wrote in a preface to her book of poetry, “are so far opposite that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties, to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.”

That is perhaps the true power of the Gothic novel. It titillates and teases us, suggests something amazing is afoot, and keeps us turning the pages to find out. Her stories epitomize that philosophy. Take this description of a spooky ruined abbey from The Romance of the Forest (1791), her most popular work:

He entered what appeared to have been the chapel of the abbey where the hymn of devotion had once been raised and the tear of penitence had once been shed sounds which could now only be recalled by imagination--tears of penitence which had been long since fixed in fate. La Motte paused a moment for he felt a sensation of sublimity rising into terror, a suspension of mingled astonishment and awe. He surveyed the vastness of the place and as he contemplated its ruins fancy bore him back to past ages. And these walls, said he, where once superstition lurked and austerity anticipated an earthly purgatory now tremble over the mortal remains of the beings who reared them.

Not horror, then, but a fascination of things beyond them is what drove young ladies to read Gothic novels long into the night. And isn’t that what all good books do today?

Books That Go Bump in the Night, Part 1

We're well into October now, which means chrysanthemums and pumpkins adorning yards and doorsteps... and not a few white muslin ghosts hanging from trees and lamp-posts and giant spiders, fake tombstones, and other scary appurtenances scattered about yards as Halloween approaches.

What is it about Halloween and the cult of spookiness? Is it the fun of getting a scare without really being…well, scared? We know that ghosts and witches and monsters aren’t really lurking around the corner, but sometimes it’s just fun to pretend that they might be…and Halloween is the time of year to indulge in that kind of fun.

But we aren’t the first to enjoy a good shiver and nervous glance over the shoulder. Our young ladies of the 19th century liked it just as well as we did. I rather think the vogue for ghost stories and other scary literature that first arose in the late 18th century and continued to blossom in the 19th is probably a direct result of the Enlightenment, that intellectual movement of the 18th century that, among other things, rang the death knell of common belief in things like witches and curses and other supernatural beliefs. People stopped believing that their horse had gone lame or their child taken ill because they had been “overlooked” by the old lady at the end of the lane with a wart on her nose and poor personal hygiene…but once the real fear of the supernatural waned, I think they also kind of missed the frisson of excitement that it lent to life.

The frisson came back in 1764 when Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, what's now known as the first Gothic novel...and for the next decades young ladies shivered over its haunted corridors, evil villains, and gigantic ghosts. I'll let Regina tell you more about the Gothic novel craze, and hope you'll come back from now through the end of the month as we look at 19th century Books that Go Bump in the Night!

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Fate sits on these dark battlements, and frowns,
And, as the portals open to receive me,
Her voice, in sullen echoes through the courts,
Tells of a nameless deed.
Frontispiece of The Mysteries of Udolpho


October is fright month on many television stations here in the states, with every horror flick from the last 30 years darkening the small screen. We have a rule at our house: no scary stuff if Mom has to be in the room. My sons and husband sigh with exaggerated patience as I stick my fingers in my ears and hum while crossing their viewing point. I just don’t like to be scared.

But that wasn’t the case for many young ladies and gentlemen in the nineteenth century. Then as today, tales of horror sent delighted shivers down their spines. The first “Gothic novel” was published in 1764: Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (although the first edition was written under a pseudonym). Gothic novels combine horror and romance, but often romance in the older meaning of the word, what today we would call adventure. They featured castles in exotic locations, what the English considered romantic time periods (often the 1500s), and menacing villains threatening lovely young heroines, but not necessarily with handsome princes riding to the rescue. The haunting supernatural events were often, but not always, explained away in the end.

Some of today’s horror icons, Dracula and Frankenstein, were popularized by nineteenth century Gothic writers Bram Stoker and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, respectively. By far one of the most popular pieces, however, was The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. Published in 1794 in four volumes, it has been called the first bestseller, and it was still a bestseller long into the nineteenth century. Jane Austen’s heroine in Northanger Abbey, which was written in 1798 but not published until 1818 after Jane had died, reads The Mysteries of Udolpho and begins to see the people around her in a whole new light.

So, are you looking for something scary on this Halloween? Or are you hiding out with a good book?