new writing: on northanger abbey
(at the paris review)
Long ago… like… a year ago…? you might recall that I was reading a bunch of Gothic novels. Or maybe you don’t remember this because you have no reason to remember all the details of my life, or you subscribed after this post, reasons of that nature. Anyway, I was actually reading all those novels for a reason. I was writing an essay about Northanger Abbey, my favorite Austen novel.1
And now that essay lives, breathes, exists online, etc. You can read it at the Paris Review’s website! Right now! Here it is:
Given that people often say and do different things, and say and want different things, how are we to read them? It is crucial, particularly for Austen’s young women when evaluating marriage prospects, to know how to tell if somebody deserves your trust before you actually need to trust them. Yet you’ll only ever know if you made the right decision when it matters. Everything else is a judgment by proxy. But given that life is not a novel, Gothic or othe…