SOURCE: "Jane Austen," in The Action of English Comedy: Studies in the Encounter of Abstraction and Experience from Shakespeare to Shaw, Yale University Press, 1970, pp. 193-249.

In the following excerpt, Kaul characterizes Northanger Abbey as a novel of education with a somewhat formulaic comic quality.

Northanger Abbey is the story of a young girl's education, or rather her double education: first through a selective and highly self-conscious course of literary readings, and then through various experiences that teach her to differentiate the real from the bookish world and thus cause her to readjust the attitudes and expectations derived from literature. In the first chapter, which offers the early history of the heroine and which seems in many ways a simple piece of burlesque writing, Jane Austen is already working toward this double comic purpose. On the one hand we are given in Catherine Morland an ordinary girl, rather...