Karolína Sailerová
Long Essay
3. To what extent is Northanger Abbey a bildungsroman?
Lisette Allen, MA (Cantab)
English Skills and Cultural Communication
20 December 2012
1812 words

Jane Austen is without doubt one of the greatest as well as most widely read novel writers in English literature. It is not easy to identify her with some literary movement. As Andrew H. Wright suggests in his book Jane Austen’s Novels, she is not really a writer of the nineteenth century to be called Romantic, “too much a person of her time to be called Classic, too original and too great to be considered a precursor or an apotheosis... .”[1] She is unique as well as her books are, especially Northanger Abbey. When thinking about this novel in detail, it becomes quite confusing, as Northanger Abbey can be placed in several generic categories. The most important one is bildungsroman. Bildungsroman is a German term for a novel of formation, as J. A. Cuddon states it means “literally an ‘upbringing’ or ‘education’ novel […] it refers to a novel which is an account of the youthful development of a hero or heroine […] it describes the processes by which maturity is achieved through the various ups and downs of life.”[2] We do see a development in the heroine of Northanger Abbey. However, Austen’s constant mocking of Catherine and her use of irony make it hard to distinguish to what extent Northanger Abbey is a bildungsroman and to what extent Jane Austen uses Catherine and her transformation as a device to create a parody of a gothic novel, although the first one seems to exceed the latter.

“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her.”[3] This is the opening sentence of Northanger Abbey where the