Two Observations on Northanger Abbey.

First Observation

I was on the phone in Nebraska when I realized I was probably going to marry Becky. We had not started dating yet. I was driving from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Central City, Nebraska, and when I got on the road, I-80, my phone said "In 788 miles, your exit will be on the right." I called Becky after Park City and we talked for 11 hours.

Like, 20 minutes is a fairly long phone call. That's a real conversation. Get to 40 and you've got yourself a Long Phone Call. And it was easy as that: I thought, well, Tim, if you've found a pretty girl that you can talk to all day, then let's not overthink this.

I thought about that when I was reading Northanger Abbey. Early on, our romantic protagonist Catherine meets a man named Henry Tilney at a dance, and they dance, and she really likes him! How exciting for her! But I wasn't sure if that was good or not. Austen describes Henry as being good, but not amazing: "He was about four or five and twenty, was rather tall, and had a pleasing countenance, a very intelligent and lively eye, and if he was not quite handsome, was very near it."

And I know my way around a Jane Austen story pretty well, so I know that some men are there to get in the way. Was this new Tilney fellow a Mr. Knightley or a Frank Churchill?

In Chapter 14, I had my answer: Catherine and Tilney love each other!! ( Yes!!!!!) It was a section that is officially referred to as "The Beechen Cliff Debate." In the introduction (to the Penguin Classics Edition I checked out from the library), Marilyn Butler, Exeter College, Oxford, wrote at some length about what this debate means, and how Catherine and Henry score this or that point against each other as they debate novels.

"Austen challenges us to pick up her text’s play of allusion; anyone who does not, but reads the scene at the level of the beginner Catherine, has lost a layer of ironic comedy, and a key cross-reference to current claims for women’s place in culture as readers and creators of genres of their own."

When I was reading, I didn't pick up on any of that. I am not, despite appearances, an English major. But clocked this much: Catherine and Henry were talking for a long time. They both made good points. They were listening to each other. Nobody else is doing that. Let's not overthink this.

It gets even better in the first few chapters of Volume II, when Catherine is on her way to Northanger Abbey itself. On the cliff, she established herself as a huge fan of mystery and adventure stories, and she's only 17, she's thrilled at what she might find at the ancient and mysterious house her crush lives at.

"Oh well obviously you're going to be staying in a totally different wing of the house, in a room nobody's seen since one of my aunt died there under mysterious circumstances 20 years ago," Henry says (I'm paraphrasing). "And we'll send our oldest maid to guide you there, but it's so drafty that her candlestick is probably going to blow out. And with weather like ours, I bet there's going to be a thunderstorm, too."

"Oh! no, no—do not say so. Well, go on." (That's a direct quote)

But Henry can't keep a straight face. This goes on for pages and pages. Sometimes love is doing a bit.

Second Observation

Of course, there's 17 more chapters to go after the Beech Cliff, and 11 more after they arrive at the Abbey.

A few weeks ago, Becky and I went to see Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, which is a charming little film about a woman who she gets invited to a writing residency sponsored by Austen's descendants.

It is designed as an overt homage, a prototypical Jane Austen story, but from scratch. The protagonist, Agathe, she and her coworker can't decide if they have a crush on each other or not, they won't say what they mean. She gets off on the wrong foot with a man she meets in England, and they slowly realize they have more alike than they think. Everyone else is a caricature, sometimes obviously funny and sometimes dryly funny. There are a thousand little miscommunications and awkward moments—a poorly-timed surprise because you didn't communicate ahead of time, you say one thing to one person and don't realize someone else can hear you. It is very funny. All of these things are pitch-perfect tributes to the author herself.

In Northanger, Catherine keeps agreeing to spend time with people who were not Henry, because she made some assumption or heard something wrong about Henry being available, and then she learns Henry is available, and now she's obligated to do something else. I was so stressed out the whole time.

At one point, Catherine finally works up the nerve to say "No, I would rather do this, so thank you, but I must decline that invitation." And I was so proud of her!! And then—then!!!—John Thorpe, who's been a clown this whole time, he leaves the room and comes back and says (I'm paraphrasing again), "Oh no worries Catherine, I know you'd rather hang out with us, so I declined on your behalf! I told them that you can't make it because you're spending time with us." I'll kill him!

Many of those situations can be solved with a simple, though unpleasant, conversation. Often, I find that it tries my patience when stories rely on miscommunication for plot—I'm just annoyed with everybody involved. "This is a solvable problem!" I think. "Solve it!"

It's okay, in Northanger, that they don't, for three reasons and I'll give them weakest to strongest. First, it's a comedy of manners in 18th-century England. Rules and politeness have power there that they don't have in my world. Second, more convincingly, Catherine is seventeen. She gets put in so many situations that she has never had to navigate before.

"I'm sorry if you're living and you're seventeen."

—The 1975, "The 1975" (2022)

Third and finally, uh, Jane Austen invented the love story, and this was her first one, written at age 23, so she gets a pass!

So we see two sides of the same coin here, yeah? Austen—with incredible genius—created a world where you have to slog through a million annoying miscommunications with all kinds of people, but in the end, you get to the person you love. The one you can actually talk to.

Let's Get Going.

It's been a busy few weeks! I thought I had a lot more time for this e-mail than I did, but I've been busy more or less since Wednesday the 25. Travelling. Work's busy. Learning HTML is going slowly. It's going, but what I've learned for next month is that I need to set aside more time before these than I used to. Also I've been writing this right in the code editor, which is probably not the way to do it? I've been writing the code and writing the essay at the same time, and it probably makes more sense to do one at a time. Learning!

Anyway. It's 7:30 pm on July 7, so let's just run through a last few things.

This weekend, Becky picked up an MLK biography at the airport, and soon after she told me that Martin Luther King Jr. was born Michael King (Jr.) but then his dad, Michael Sr., became infatuated with Martin Luther the Reformer, and so he decided to call himself Martin Luther, which is itself unusual behavior, but if we accept that he's doing that, then it only stands to reason that if the first Michael changes his name, every downstream Michael is affected. You can't really have a family where you're named Martin Luther and your son is Michael Jr., I guess.

Thank you, as always, for reading. Expect the next issue on August 7, which is a Thursday. Hopefully a little earlier in the day.

From Tulsa,

Tim

© 2025 Tim Hatton