SOURCE: "Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen," in The Romantic Novel in England, Harvard University Press, 1972, pp. 118-35.

In the excerpt below, Kiely focuses on the thematic importance of language in Northanger Abbey.

Jane Austen thought the capabilities of language, correctly used, considerable, and early in Northanger Abbey she opens her gentle assault on romantic fiction with a defense of the novel:

I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. [A novel at its best can be a] work in which the greatest...