Northanger Abbey. 2nd ed.

Li-Ping Geng is a visiting assistant professor of English at the
Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is the author of The Loiterer
and Jane Austen’s Literary Identity.

This second Broadview edition of Northanger Abbey is not significantly
different from the first. The introduction is slightly revised, and the
appendixes are rearranged and somewhat expanded. The editor provides a
clear text, helpful note, and informative background material (this last
being a hallmark of Broadview Literary Texts series).

However, a few minor points might bother an academic reader. Northanger
Abbey is essentially an 18th-century novel, so it is not clear why this
edition uses a “Victorian” cover girl to attract readers (the first
edition used two). It is also regrettable that the original two-volume
structure is not properly preserved. The “Note on the Text” explains
that this edition adopts the emendations noted by R.W. Chapman in his
Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen (1923), which were further revised in
1965 and 1969 by Mary Lascelles (Chapman died in 1960). My random check
reveals a number of variants, which the “Note” fails to mention. For
example, in Chapman’s edition, “Mr.” or “Mrs.” has a period
after it; in the Broadview edition, the period is omitted. Jane Austen
often used dashes in conjunction with other punctuation (e.g., “And to
marry for money I think the wickedest thing in existence.—Good
day.—”), yet these dashes are omitted in the Broadview edition.
Silent changes are also seen in the format of Isabella’s letter to
Catherine in Volume 2, which begins in Chapman’s edition with “Bath,
April—” nearly flush with the right-hand margin (both words are
italicized); in the Broadview edition the two words are moved to the
left and “April” is no longer italicized. It is also a bit odd to
read in the introduction that “Henry Austen read and assessed the
political and publishing climate in 1818 in such a way that the novel,
once he prefixed his Biographical Notice, would not bring calumny upon
his sister’s head and reputation,” when it is known that Jane Austen
died before Northanger Abbey was published in December 1817.

Nonetheless, this fine second edition bespeaks two things: that Jane
Austen is still popular and that the edition is of high quality.