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Catherine, at any rate, heard enough to feel, that in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty (Northanger Abbey 24*7]
THE WORKS OF Jane Austen, claimed by readers of every possible background and interest, defy attempts at easy categorization. They transcend what current publishers like to call "niche," even as they attempt to create one by piling bookstore tables with Austen-homage literature. It is possible, however, to view Austen's writing through various prisms - feminist, romantic, historical, and the like - and derive fresh insights from each lens. Even writers of the modern mystery genre are eager to claim Jane as one of their own: in the architecture of her stories they discern many of the classic planks of detective fiction.
At the core of each of Austen's novels lies a social solecism - a crime - shocking enough to upset the natural order of her characters' bucolic world, a crime that demands investigation, exposure, and resolution so that peace and order may be restored. Wickham lies, contracts debts, and seduces girls of fifteen; Willoughby abandons both Marianne and his pregnant mistress and marries for money; Frank Churchill commits fraud by forming a secret engagement with one lady while flagrantly pursuing another. In Northanger Abbey, the mercenary General Tilney ruthlessly ejects young Catherine Morland from his home without explanation or concern for her safety. Murder? Hardly. But it is Austen's genius to offer each of her heroines a mystery she must solve - and through its resolution, secure order and happiness in her future life. In this, Austen anticipated the modern detective novel. As W H. Au den notes, "The fantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the fantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law" (24).
What does Auden intend to convey by that phrase "love as love and not as the law?" I think he regards the resolution of a detective plot - the restoration of order and peace in a broken community - as being founded upon a spirit of mutual forgiveness; founded, moreover, upon the acknowledgment...