Susan Zlotnick, “From Involuntary Object to Voluntary Spy: Female Agency, Novels, and the Marketplace in Northanger Abbey”
Susan Zlotnick argues in this essay that the “two major preoccupations” of Northanger Abbey are reading and shopping. She explores the ways in which the economic and the literary shape this novel, particularly the development of the female characters as agents in the marriage market. Arguing that the Gothic—particularly as it is embodied in the novels of Ann Radcliffe—developed at least some agency for its female characters, Zlotnick then makes the case that in Northanger Abbey Austen, too, is particularly concerned with her female characters’ agency. Catherine Morland, with her immersion in novels, achieves a degree of agency that the two other female protagonists, Isabella Thorpe and Eleanor Tilney, do not.