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In a pivotal moment in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Catherine Morland commits one of the more significant faux pas in the history of the courtship plot: she tells her suitor, Henry Tilney, that she suspects that his father murdered his mother. Henry grants his father's cold and difficult temper. But Henry then sets out to reclaim the Tilney estate from its realm in Catherine's imagination: the continental, Catholic settings of Ann Radcliffe's gothic novels. Instead, Henry identifies the Abbey as a Georgian country home whose problematic cultural origins have long since ceased to be relevant:
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 every thing open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?1
As scholars have observed, Henry's allusion to "voluntary spies" recalls government methods for silencing political reformers during the politically polarized 1790s.2 Equally revealing, however, is the invocation here of the range of spaces that act as delivery systems for this topical reference. Henry's speech as a whole provides a useful summary of the social and political spaces in Austen's work, and the kinds of practices associated with each. At the most local level, there is the estate, or in this case the Abbey, the ancestral home of the patriarch. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the nation-" England"-a geographical area whose inhabitants are unified by a shared cultural inheritance and religion, but also by an evolving infrastructure facilitating the movement of people and information. Scholars have attended insightfully to Austen's rep- resentations of these nodes of geography.3 My own interest lies in the layers of spatial organization at issue in Northanger Abbey between the categories of the nation and the country estate, for which Henry Tilney provides a term: the neighborhood. This spatial context...