Note 7 — INTRODUCTION

As twentieth-century readers, we are probably more familiar with—and more sympathetic to—the side that supported the ethical superiority of novels over romances. Much of Catherine Moreland's education in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), for instance, involves her gradual realization of the inferiority of romances. Her errors continue as long as she expects to lead a life like that of Emily in Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Crucial to Catherine's education is her discovery "that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England," is not "to be looked for" in romances (chap. xxv). Romances can be dangerous since they often provide faulty models of moral action for readers who are likely to confuse romantic adventures with the roles they must assume in real life. This attack on romances in Northanger Abbey, moreover, is neither new nor unique, Catherine Moreland being but the literary descendant of such eighteenth-century "female quixotes" as Polly Peachum, Lydia Languish, Polly Honeycomb, and Lydia Melford.