ABSTRACT
Introduction Nortbanger Abbey was the first novel that Austen wrote (at the age of about twenty-four) and had accepted for publication. Drafted in 1798 or 1799, revised in 1803 and possibly again, very lightly, in 1816, it was none the less not published until after Austen's death in 1817 (1818 appears on the title-page), a delay that remains unexplained. It is very much the product of the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the new. These decades saw the political experiment of the French Revolution and witnessed its aftermath, the Napoleonic Empire. They were a time of political and intellectual ferment in which writers, artists, philosophers, politicians and the ordinary working man were engaged in an urgent rethinking of 'things as they are' and 'things as they should be' (to borrow two much-used phrases from polemicists including William Godwin,Mary Wollstonecraft and their associates). Rooted in this period, then, Nortbanger Abbey has a special status here because it selfconsciously foregrounds in comic mode an (implicitly political) struggle over how to represent 'things as they are', or 'reality' ,. an argument which we also take to govern, overtly or covertly', the entire history of the nineteenth-century novel.
