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father’s own suffering when, as a child, he and his siblings were expelled from the family home by their step-mother Susanna Kelk.
     
    On 17 January 1797 James was remarried to Mary Lloyd. In that year Thomas Knight II’s widow Catherine, transferred to Jane’s brother Edward, the Knights’ adoptive son, Godmersham Park in Kent, and the estates of Steventon and Chawton in Hampshire, together with most of her late husband’s fortune. This provided the latter with an income of £ 5,000 per annum. Meanwhile, Catherine retired to White Friars – a house in Canterbury.
    July 1797 saw Eliza de Feullide debating with herself which of her ‘variety of rural Plans … to adopt’, one of her optionsbeing to ‘retire into the embowering shades of the Rectory [i.e. Steventon]’. 1
    Jane and Cassandra visited Bath in November 1797 accompanied by their mother Mrs Cassandra Austen. Here, they stayed for about a month with Jane’s aunt and uncle, James and Jane Leigh-Perrot (James being Mrs Austen’s brother). The Leigh-Perrots were accustomed to spending about half the year in the city, where they rented a house at 1 Paragon Buildings. In the same month George Austen wrote to the London publisher Thomas Cadell, to inform them that he was in possession of a manuscript (Jane’s novel First Impressions ), and to see if they might be interested in publishing it. An answer in the negative was received.
    Eliza finally accepts the hand of her cousin Henry Austen, and the couple are married on 31 December 1797. (Henry was the third of Jane’s brothers to marry).

    Notes
    1.­ Le Faye, Jane Austen’s ‘Outlandish Cousin’ , p. 140.

12
Northanger Abbey
    Northanger Abbey , written in 1797–98, began life as Susan . It was revised in 1802–03 and again in 1815–16 under the title Catherine . (The novel was finally published in 1818, after Jane’s death, by John Murray). In Northanger Abbey , Jane makes the Gothic novel – a type of romance popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – the target of her wit and satire. In the words of author J.M. Evans she:
    parodied those people who loved thrills and gorged themselves mentally with mysteries – strange noises, confessions of murders found in chests, secrets hidden in cabinets … etc. 1
    The heroine is 17-year-old Catherine Morland, the daughter of a clergyman. She is described as plain, awkward, inattentive and always preferring those enjoyments which she was forbidden to take. As for Catherine’s mother:
    she had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as any body might expect, she still lived on – lived to have six children more …
    So here is Jane, on the very first page of the novel, treating the prospect of death in a humorous and witty way. (Death in childbirth, of course, was a common occurrence in her day).
    When she was young, Catherine had no objection to books provided that ‘nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them [and] provided that they were all story and no reflection’. From the age of 15, however, her tastes become more refined as she acquaints herself with authors such as Pope, Gray, Thompson and Shakespeare.
    The Allens are friends of Catherine’s family; Mrs Allen being described as a person:
    whose vacancy of mind and incapacity for thinking was such, that as she never talked a great deal, so she could never be entirely silent….
    When they decide to visit Bath in Somersetshire, where Mr Allen proposes to have treatment for his gout, Catherine is invited to accompany them.
    Before they leave for Bath, Mrs Allen cautions Catherine ‘against the violence of such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing young ladies away to some remote farm-house [the object of which is not explained, but may be guessed at]’. As for her own daughter Isabella, Mrs Allen begs her always to wrap herself up ‘very warm about the throat, when you come from the [Assembly] Rooms