SOURCE: "The Lessons of Northanger Abbey," in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. XLIV, No. 1, Fall, 1974, pp. 14-30.

Here, Rothstein explores Austen's narrative technique in Northanger Abbey, claiming that the central theme of the novel emerges from the interplay between the respective educations of Catherine and the reader.

In Northanger Abbey, as in a number of works of eighteenth-century fiction (say, Tom Jones), the protagonist and the reader undergo parallel, but in almost no way identical, educations. The reader, as Austen's irony announces in the first paragraph, is to be led toward something better than the conventional novels to which she alludes again and again in the course of the book. As to the protagonist, the first chapter offers a dry account of Catherine's progress in music and drawing; these early lessons are extended by Mrs Allen and Henry Tilney, who teach her how to choose muslins and compose...