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"Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"
They had reached the end of the gallery; and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room. (McEwan xi; NA 197-98)
THE PASSAGE FROM Northanger Abbey reproduced above appears as the epigraph to Ian McEwan's 2001 novel Atonement.1 McEwan's decision to feature this Austen quotation has several effects. First, it encourages his readers to apply Henry Tilney's words to Atonement as well as to identify parallels between this novel and Austen's work more generally2 War looms over 1930s England in Atonement as it did in Austen's own world, though the "atrocities" (NA 197) perpetrated in McEwan's novel, including rape and war crimes, are much more horrible than anything depicted by Austen. So, too, the consequences of the mistaken "suspicions" and misinterpreted "observations" of Briony Tallis, McEwan's young and over-imaginative heroine, which are far grimmer than those that result from Catherine Morland's erroneous conclusions. (Unlike General Tilney, who proves himself capable of extreme lack of consideration if not outright cruelty, the man whom Briony accuses is indeed innocent and is jailed as a result of her testimony.) The action of the first of Atonement's three main parts takes place at a country estate that is, despite the modernity of its construction, reminiscent of those at the center of Austen's novels. As in Mansfield Park, the young people's behavior in Atonement is affected by the absence of the father - in this case Jack Tallis, a government minister absorbed in concerns about the buildup to the second world war and the retreat into...