All the single men: Northanger Abbey
...and the Austen award for "perfect man" goes to—
Greetings Austenites—
At long last, I present the fifth installment of Austen Math, in which I quantitatively evaluate Jane Austen’s single men and her heroines’ judgment of them.
Today we have Northanger Abbey, a novel less revered in my youth than I now think it should have been. If you’re new here and prefer to start from the beginning (not necessary; dealer’s choice), voilà:
A few other notes and housekeeping:
This coming Saturday, April 5 at 2pm ET I will be joining and for an salon on the Economics of Jane Austen. I’m looking forward to it immensely, and hope to see some of you there (online).
Secondly, I want to recommend Rebecca Romney’s new book, Jane Austen’s Bookshelf in the strongest possible terms. I have so much to say about it that I have again run afoul of Substack’s email length limit; you’ll want to read this installment in your browser or the app.
You may remember Romney as the delightful rare book expert schooling Chumlee on Pawn Stars. In Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, she parlays her expertise into a reputational history of eight women writers Austen herself admired: Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Hanna More, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth.
Spoiler alert: most of these women do not seem to have been dropped from the canon for particularly good reasons. A shocking number of them have had their work falsely attributed to the same man—Samuel Johnson. This context in general and especially the Ann Radcliffe chapter greatly enhanced my subsequent re-reading of Northanger Abbey. I had too blithely followed the usual line on it: an effective Gothic satire, itself inferior to Austen’s other squarely realist work.
How could I forget that literary satire is always a kind of compliment—that to do it right requires such focused attention to its subject; such dependency on it! And Austen approaches the Gothic with that most flattering strain—“the kind of hip irony that permits one to simultaneously be a part of something and make fun of it without contradiction.” Northanger Abbey now strikes me far less as a Gothic takedown than an impassioned defense of novels writ large. To Radcliffe in particular, I’d argue it rises to homage. Romney quotes this same passage:
Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss——?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. It is only Cecilia [Burney], or Camilla [Burney], or Belinda [Edgeworth]”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
…which is also the original source of another recent insight, first uncovered here thanks to
:Many thanks to Simon & Schuster for the advanced reader copy of Jane Austen’s Bookshelf. I am proudly reading The Mysteries of Udolpho now.
Finally, there are two reader comments I want to highlight before diving in. In response to the previous installment on Mansfield Park,
shared:Just come across:"There are such beings in the world - perhaps one in a thousand - as the creature you and I should think perfection; where grace and spirit are united to worth, where the manners are equal to the heart and understanding; but such a person may not come into your way, or, if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a man of fortune..." JA to Fanny Knight 18 Nov 1814. Which you may already be aware of as it totally confirms Austen Math.
I was not aware! But I cannot say I am surprised—and will indeed be taking this as Austen’s full-fledged endorsement of her namesake Math. Thank you, Ronald.
My other shoutout is to BDM, who has been steadfastly advocating for her perfect man since the Pride and Prejudice installment (and just got a book deal—congratulations!):
Alas, I’m not sure I’ll be able to satisfy you here, B. D.—but have you met his brother-in-law?
Austen Math 101
Jane Austen, arguably the greatest novelist of all time, was the author of six marriage-plot comedies of manners published between 1811 and 1817: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. There is rampant dispute as to how to read them. “The people who read Austen for the romance and the people who read Austen for the sociology are both reading her correctly,” Louis Menand argues, “because Austen understands courtship as an attempt to achieve the maximum point of intersection between love and money.”
Menand’s vaguely mathematical binary is directionally accurate but insufficiently sophisticated. Austen is absolutely a marital maximizationist, but her calculations have far greater dimensional depth. As such, neither the die-hard romantics nor sociologists are reading her correctly; they are equally mistaken. Over- or under-weighting any single dimension of Austenian courtship maximization amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of what she most cunningly gets:
Austen understood status—ahem, station; that its shoring up is hardly superficial. The intrigue of the marriage plot springs not just from uncertain affection—“will they fuck”—but the balance of such possibilities with a complex and often competing set of considerations. Status questions, basically, though to the standard socioeconomic strains I would add, particularly in Austen’s case, that of moral status. Alas, fuckability is a kind of status, too.
The Austen Math model more or less directly follows my original offhand vision, ranking all of Austen’s single men across four weighted dimensions—fortune, morals, manners, and fuckability—to develop secondary insights, calculate their individual total status, and analyze their relative marital desirability. The heroines, in turn, are judged by their dimensional weighting (and to what extent it shifts over time) versus the Austenian baseline. In other words: they are judged on the soundness of their judgment. The better a heroine is at Austen Math herself, the more virtuous she is deemed.
And what of love per se? Even the most sophisticated mathematical models are simplified phenomenological representations. Indeed, this is the purpose of models. I’d argue love is largely represented indirectly by a proprietary mix of the various dimensions—but I do not claim to capture all of Austen’s complexity, let alone any universal truths.
Methodology*
I. Dimensional raw scoring of single men
Each single man is evaluated on each of the four primary status dimensions of FORTUNE, MORALS, MANNERS, and FUCKABILITY using a whole-number score of 1 to 6, one being low and six high, based on textual analysis by yours truly.
My definitions are as follows, with help from Merriam-Webster (MW):
By FORTUNE (n), I mean “riches; wealth,” in line with MW 1.2, “a man of fortune.”
By MORALS (n), I mean both “ethics” and “modes of conduct,” per MW 2.2a-b, in the context of Christian Regency norms without blind deference to them.
By MANNERS (n), I mean personal bearing, air, deportment, style, etc., running the gamut of MW 1a-e, again filtered through a critical Regency lens.
By FUCKABILITY (n), admittedly not in MW, I mean sexual desirability, predominantly but not exclusively based on physical attractiveness, also including demonstrable charm, wit, and je ne sais quoi.
The six-point scale both allows for sufficient differentiation across Austen’s six novels and forces non-neutrality.
II. Austenian primary status weighting (baseline)
The four primary dimensions predict total status via uneven weight distribution, in alignment with the hierarchy of Austen’s values as I have long understood them:
MORALS - 40%
FORTUNE - 30%
MANNERS - 20%
FUCKABILITY - 10%
for a total of 100%.
The formula to calculate total estimated Austenian status is a basic SUMPRODUCT: D1*W1 + D2*W2 + D3*W3 + D4*W4, where D=dimensional raw score and W=Austenian weight.
III. Secondary dimension calculations
Each pair of congruous primary dimensions yields insights into a secondary dimension. At the intersection
of FORTUNE and MORALS is WORTH,
of MORALS and MANNERS is CHARACTER,
of MANNERS and FUCKABILITY is AFFECT,
and of FUCKABILITY and FORTUNE is ELIGIBILITY.
Secondary dimension calculations may be performed either via weighted or unweighted averages of their raw inputs to harness insights inclusive or exclusive of Austenian status bias, respectively.
Note the secondary dimensions get closer to viscerally lovable personal attributes—character, affect—but would be harder to directly quantify themselves (e.g.: worth is more subjective than fortune).
IV. Heroine dimensional weight variance
Each heroine is evaluated on the difference between her hierarchy of the four primary status dimensions (again per my textual analysis) and Austen’s. Like in the Austenian baseline, the heroine’s top-priority dimension is weighted 0.4, with -0.1 for each subsequent priority.
The formula for dimensional weight variance is: |W1-H1|+|W2-H2|+|W3-H3|+|W4-H4|, where W=Austenian baseline weight and H=heroine weight. I use this absolute-value “spread” calc over true squared variance for its simplicity, clarity, and sufficiency given the small size of the data set. The score will fall between 0 and 0.8 in increments of 0.2, and can be roughly interpreted as follows with regards to the heroine’s judgment:
0 - Unimpeachable
0.2 - Sound
0.4 - So-so
0.6 - Precarious
0.8 - Misguided
I.e., the lower the score, the better her judgment. In some cases, heroines’ dimensional values change over the course of the novel, in which cases I calculate both starting and ending hierarchy for comparison to estimate their development.
*Feel free—nay, encouraged—to quibble with any of this. We are here first and foremost to have fun, and banter is damn close to my definition of it.
Credentials
While admittedly an amateur Austen scholar, I am the daughter of a doting professional one—and a professional novelist and management consultant myself (see: Portrait, patents). My undergraduate degree is in English and my graduate an MBA: a thoroughly Austenian compromise. Her voice has been inseparable from that of my own conscience since I was ten years old.
Part 5: Northanger Abbey
Catherine Morland, distinguished by little more than averageness, steps into her unlikely heroineic role with the invitation to accompany her wealthy neighbors, the Allens, to Bath. There she meets aspiring cynosure and fellow novel-lover Isabella Thorpe, wry and dreamy clergyman Henry Tilney, Isabella’s brother John Thorpe—and, to Catherine’s surprise, John’s Oxford chum: her own brother James Morland.
The young people dance and flirt; they turn about Bath’s various Rooms. James falls for Isabella, Isabella for James, and John for Catherine. A convenient foursome—if Catherine would return John’s “d——” affections. But she’s already in love with Henry, more eager to make the acquaintance of his sister, Eleanor Tilney, than to play fourth wheel—even if it means she’ll miss the chance to see a Gothic castle. Nonetheless, James and Isabella get engaged. Then the eldest Tilney sibling, Captain Frederick Tilney, arrives in Bath as well. His attentions focus on Isabella, and are a bit too warmly received—but Catherine does not have long to dwell on her friend’s curious behavior. The season is drawing to a close, and Eleanor—with the full blessing of her father, the foreboding General Tilney—has invited Catherine for an extended visit to their ancient seat: Northanger Abbey.
The single men
Mr. Henry Tilney; Mr. John Thorpe; Mr. James Morland; Captain Frederick Tilney; Lord——
Fortune
The Tilneys are loaded, but it is first-born Captain Frederick who is set to inherit Northanger Abbey and the lion share of its pecuniary benefits. Still, Henry makes out uncommonly well for a clergyman, expecting “a very considerable fortune” on top of his “income of independence and comfort” at Woodston. 5/6 for the Captain, as he’s yet to inherit, and, in an unprecedented score for a Man of the Church, 4/6 for Henry.
James Morland’s future living is finalized on his engagement to Isabella at £400 per year. It’s enough to live on, but as meager a clergy income as Tilney’s is flush—and comes as heavy blow to the Thorpes’ expectations, no doubt inflated by John’s overestimation of anything and anyone associated with himself. While we know less of John Thorpe’s own prospects, Austen describes his mother, with whom he is on good terms, as “a widow, and not a very rich one.” I think it safe to assume Thorpe’s inflation of the Morlands fortune at least on par with that of his own. 2/6 each for the college friends.
Lord——, “introduced” late in the novel, will likewise receive consolidated analysis the end of “The Single Men” section.
Morals
Henry Tilney’s moral exceptionalism among Austenian clergymen is nearly as uncommon as his finances, a fact that I cannot help but correlate to his rare mention of religion at all. His goodness is expressed not in sermons but his own personal conduct: from forgiving Catherine’s naïveté to seeking her hand in spite of the General’s error. Totally upstanding chap: 6/6.
James Morland, too, is a good sort of fellow, if, like his sister, pretty unexceptional and easy prey. The worst I think we can truly charge him with here is a little thoughtlessness in the most pressing throes of love. After realizing Isabella’s true nature, he warns his sister clearly and promptly despite “little inclination for writing”: “Dearest Catherine, beware how you give your heart.” 5/6.
John Thorpe is as pathological a liar as his sister, and like her, too, is this tendency’s aim of self-aggrandizement. The vanity Isabel manifests in falsely refusing false attention John demonstrates in false fault and false praise. His over- and under-represention of Catherine’s fortune at different points in the novel in particular has no small collateral impact. 2/6.
Captain Tilney gets the same score of 2/6, but for very different reasons. His is the more classic Austenian crime—and while he stops short of seducing Isabella, blowing up her engagement to James (a good match for her!) is about the next worst thing.
Manners
Here too Henry is the picture of masculine charm—“a very gentleman-like young man.” Honest yet discreet, witty yet polite, and a defender of novels ready to discuss The Mysteries of Udolpho? What a delight! 6/6.
On the other end of the spectrum, John Thorpe may just be Austen’s most vulgar man. Not only is he a liar, a braggart, a boor, and a lout—the sort of man who refuses to stop his carriage when ladies beg to disembark—but he uses language Austen deems unfit for the page. The “d——” a—— gets 1/6.
James and Captain Tilney fall in between; the former too average to stand out, and the latter, for all his fine breeding, too familiar for total propriety. But this is hardly what differentiates them in Isabella’s mind. Both score 4/6.
Fuckability
The Tilney brothers share some pretty fuckable genes. Henry “seemed to be about four or five and twenty, was rather tall, had a pleasing countenance, a very intelligent and lively eye, and, if not quite handsome, was very near it.” Even Catherine “supposed it possible that some people might think [Captain Tilney] handsomer than his brother.” But what the Captain boasts in superior hotness Henry certainly makes up for in je ne sais quoi—5/6 for both of them.
Catherine “secretly acknowledged the power of love” in Isabella’s outsized appraisal of James’s handsomeness—and yet (in a very funny line to modern ears) remains “exceedingly fond of her brother, and partial to all his endowments.” So let’s give him the plus side of average at 4/6.
To Thorpe, I cannot be so kind. “He was a stout young man of middling height, who, with a plain face and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he wore the dress of a groom.” Let’s just say he’s still single at the end. 1/6.
So what about Lord——?!
I refer, of course, to Eleanor Tilney’s nameless Viscount of the misplaced washing-bills. He is, there being few accounts, by all accounts perfection:
Her partiality for this gentleman was not of recent origin; and he had been long withheld only by inferiority of situation from addressing her [6/6 morals]. His unexpected accession to title and fortune had removed all his difficulties; and never had the general loved his daughter so well in all her hours of companionship, utility, and patient endurance as when he first hailed her “Your Ladyship!” [6/6 fortune] Her husband was really deserving of her; independent of his peerage, his wealth, and his attachment, being to a precision the most charming young man in the world [6/6 manners]. Any further definition of his merits must be unnecessary; the most charming young man in the world is instantly before the imagination of us all [6/6 fuckability].
Secondary dimensions & insights
Let us gaze in fresh wonder upon the geometric beauty of the octagon!
I find this chart fascinating more broadly, as it simultaneously foreruns some of Austen’s most successful archetypes while having clear ties to an earlier era. (Northanger Abbey was published posthumously in 1818, but first drafted by Austen in the 1790s at the height of Gothic-mania).
In addition to our truly perfect man, we have: a near perfect one (in line with several Austenian heroes), a total brute, a highly eligible man of low morals (see esp.: Henry Crawford), and a financially-challenged nice guy (see esp.: Edward Ferrars).
Weighted Austenian Total Status Model
Looking at the weighted model, we see the widest spread of scores yet:
Again I feel the benefits of following my father’s recommended reading order, here in the immediate contrast this presents to the single men of Mansfield Park’s status similarity. There is a fair argument to be made that the degree of differentiation inversely correlates to overall novel complexity, and if Mansfield Park is Austen’s trickiest novel, Northanger Abbey is her simplest. Note this is not a value distinction—though I suspect its misleading flavor of one a contributing factor to Northanger Abbey’s under-appreciation.
The heroine
Miss Catherine Morland
Somewhat akin to Fanny Price, Catherine is an atypically plain lone heroine whose evaluation of character lacks not merit but experience. And yet, it doesn’t feel quite right to call her “a heroine who is right” with 0 - Unimpeachable judgment as it does Fanny, though that is how I would have to rate her, too. Catherine shows questionable judgment in her Gothic quest, rather than in the marital evaluation of young men.
Again, this is a novel more closely tied to the customs of a slightly but meaningfully earlier period, and Romney helps to explain what’s going on:
novels of the late eighteenth century had a Heroine Problem. A heroine must experience something remarkable to hold the reader’s interest; yet in this era, saying that a woman had “adventures” was a euphemism for illicit liaisons that would likely lead to being cast out of high society. She must be both faultless and yet, somehow, not boring. That’s the Heroine Problem: How could authors compose an exciting story when moral authorities demanded that their main character never be a “bad example” to other young women readers?
Naïveté, as Romney also notes, presents an effective solution. But it is a solution less effectively represented by my heroine model. Alas, I am finally ready to admit it is not so robust as its counterpart. Fortunately (with a nod to
), this very counterpart is just the model Northanger Abbey seems to want in illustrating the most consequential evolution of its heroine:
That evolution being Catherine’s total weighted status in the mind of General Tilney. Holding her moral, manners, and fuckability scores of 6/6, 5/6, and 4/6 constant, his outsized prioritization of fortune still leads to a huge swing in his assessment of her as a match for Henry. John Thorpe’s wild exaggeration of Catherine’s wealth early on (6/6 - General 1) prompts the fateful invitation to the Abbey that Thorpe’s subsequent misrepresentation in the opposite direction (1/6 - General 2) so rudely rescinds. “She was guilty only of being less rich than he supposed her to be.”
Catherine’s true fortune of £3,000 falls in between, raising General Tilney’s appraisal to the level of begrudging “consent” in the afterglow of Eleanor’s marriage to Lord —— (3/6 - General 3). This score is more favorable still re-weighted to the Austenian baseline, for a total status score of 4.7—certainly close enough to Henry’s 5.3 to make it a reasonable match for him, and in line with Austen’s testament that “under every pecuniary view, it was a match beyond the claims of their daughter.”
Other misc. notes from this read:
Isabella Thorpe would do very well in a sorority at the University of Virginia.
“In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.” Right on, Henry. Too often we index to subsegments things better judged at the human level.
Gothic vs. realist novels operate at different levels of “subjunctivity,” to borrow a brilliant idea from Douglas R. Hofstadter. The Gothic “violates our sense of ‘possibility’” far more than realist fiction, even though both are equally fictional. (I will have much more to say about Hofstader and his *sublime* Gödel, Escher, Bach in the coming . . . lifetime.)
NEXT UP: Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion. Hailed as her most mature, it’s a perennial offbeat favorite of sophisticated readers. I’m looking forward to re-reading.
Until then—
ANJ
i love having discovered something like this has been written. i had no idea someone might do it and it's so great. and fun. thanks.
The main conclusion is that I really need to read Northanger Abbey.