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"[W] hen you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you."
"Have you, indeed! How glad I am!-What are they all?" ". . . Castle of Wolfen bach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time."
"Yes, . . . but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?"
'Yes, quite sure." (NA 40)
DURING THIS CONVERSATION WITH ISABELLA THORPE, Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, reveals her intense infatuation with Gothic novels and suggests their ability to instill horror in the reader. Despite Catherine's palpable enthusiasm for these "horrid" novels, for many years readers believed that Isabella Thorpe's list was a mere product of Jane Austen's vivid imagination. In 1901, however, John Louis Haney informed the editors of Modern Language Notes that while "[i] t might be supposed that Miss Austen, in her evident satire of the Udolpho class of fiction, invented the above suggestive titles, . . . Qa]] s a matter of fact, they were all actual romances which appeared at London between 1798-1798" (446). This revelation should have been the catalyst for countless studies regarding these novels' connections to and influences on Northanger Abbey, but they remained largely overlooked, fading into the shadows of literature.
Perhaps due to limited availability, these "horrid" novels languished in relative obscurity until Michael Sadleir presented "The Northanger Novels: A Footnote to Jane Austen" to the English Association in Westminster School Hall in 1927. Sadleir addressed Austen's motives for choosing these specific novels for her Gothic tale:
it seems probable that the spinster-genius had . . . actually more pleasure and even profit from the Gothic romance. . . . [C]ertainly a woman of her sympathy and perception-however ready she may have been publicly to make fun of the excesses of a prevailing chic-would in her heart have given to that chic as much credit for its qualities as mockery for its absurdities. (3)
He concluded that Northanger Abbey parodied the Gothic genre but also subtly acknowledged its tropes and gave tribute to the talents of...