SOURCE: "The Comedy of Illusion in Northanger Abbey, " in Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, Vol. LI, 1966, pp. 547-58.

In the following essay, Baker describes Austen's ironic use of self-delusion in Northanger Abbey.

Northanger Abbey, the third written but least revised and hence most pristine of Jane Austen's early novels, has not lacked admirers. Indeed, Andrew Wright, John K. Mathison, Alan D. McKillop, and Henrietta Ten Harmsel have led us progressively to see the dimensions of realism and validity within the novel's burlesque of Gothic romance. But there is still room, I believe, to emphasize the extent to which Jane Austen uses romance itself not merely as a comic delusion from which a young girl grows awake, but as a central symbol of one of the most persistent realities of life: the inescapable comic and ironic propensity of the human mind to delude itself...