jane austen and the gothic novels: the reception of

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 47.1 March 2021: 211-229 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.202103_47(1).0010

Jane Austen and the Gothic Novels: The Reception of

Northanger Abbey in China

Shuo Sun

School of Foreign Studies

China University of Petroleum (East China), China

Abstract Jane Austen’s Gothic parody Northanger Abbey was first published in 1818

and translated into Chinese in 1958 under the title Nuosangjue Si (諾桑覺寺).

However, the novel has remained unpopular in China to this day and has

received considerably less critical attention than Austen’s other works,

especially Pride and Prejudice (1813). This article examines the reception of

Northanger Abbey in China since the early twentieth century, considering in

particular the reasons for contemporary readers’ lukewarm response to the

novel. It argues that a knowledge of Gothic conventions and elements is

crucial to an understanding of the literary satire in Northanger Abbey—and

yet Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels were not available to Chinese readers in

translation until very recent decades. It also addresses the difficulties that

arose when translating the Gothic-sounding title of Northanger Abbey from

English into Chinese and explores the influence of Marxist literary criticism

on the first translation of the novel.

Keywords

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Gothic Novels, Reception, China

This work was supported by the Youth Project of Shandong Social Science Planning Program

(山東省社會科學規劃研究項目‧青年項目) (Grant No. 20DWWJ05) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (中央高校基本科研業務費專項資金) (Grant No. 21CX04010B).

212 Concentric 47.1 March 2021

Northanger Abbey (1818) is widely regarded to be a parody of the Gothic

novels that were most popular in late eighteenth-century Britain. Jane Austen

(1775-1817) depicts her heroine Catherine Morland as an innocent young girl

whose excessive indulgence in the reading of Gothic romances, particularly Ann

Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), causes her failure in distinguishing

between fiction and reality. Austen wrote the first draft of Northanger Abbey, then

entitled Susan, around 1798-99 and further revised it in 1816-17.1 The novel was

published posthumously in December 1817 (although the title page states 1818),

five months after Austen’s death. It is very likely that the Gothic-sounding

title—Northanger Abbey—was given by Austen’s brother, Henry, who arranged for

the publication. Indeed, the current title makes explicit the book’s thematic

connection with the Gothic novels of Austen’s time.

More than two hundred years after her death, Austen has earned global fame

as one of the greatest writers of the English language. In recent decades, Austen has

gained wide popularity in China, and her six major novels have all been translated

into Chinese. However, there are presently significant differences in the reception of

each of these novels. Although Northanger Abbey was the third of Austen’s novels

to be published in China, it has proven to be one of the least popular of her works.

This article examines the Chinese reception of Northanger Abbey in the last one

hundred years with a focus on the reasons for its relative obscurity. When

Northanger Abbey was first published in China in 1958, Marxist literary criticism

has had a powerful impact on the reception of the novel which was criticized for a

lack of class consciousness. Although contemporary Chinese critics’ interest in

Northanger Abbey has focused on its satire of Gothic fiction, Radcliffe’s Udolpho

and other Gothic works mentioned in the novel did not appear in Chinese until the

early 2000s. It is, therefore, difficult for general readers to understand Austen’s

comic mockery of Gothic conventions. Recent critics, however, have paid

increasing attention to the complexity of Austen’s Gothic parody in its relation to

female education.

1 The manuscript of Susan was sold to a London publisher, Crosby & Co., for ten pounds in

1803, but it was never published. Austen’s satire of the Gothic genre may have played a major role in Crosby’s hesitation in publishing the novel—Crosby released several Gothic novels that became immensely popular during the same period. After Henry Austen bought back the manuscript of Susan from Crosby in 1816, Austen renamed it Catherine, which reflected a change of the heroine’s name. For details, see Mandal.

Shuo Sun 213

The Early Reception of Northanger Abbey in China

Austen’s novels were not known in China until the early twentieth century. In

1917, Wei Yi (魏易) first introduced the English titles of Austen’s six major novels

to Chinese readers in his Brief Profiles of Famous Western Novelists (泰西名小說家略轉 Taixi Ming Xiaoshuojia Lvezhuan), briefly noting that Northanger Abbey

was “published posthumously in 1818 along with Persuasion” (25). In 1927, Zheng

Zhenduo (鄭振鐸) published Outline of Literature (文學大綱 Wenxue Dagang),

which was among the most popular Chinese-language introductory books on

English literature during this period. The Chinese title of Northanger Abbey

appeared in the book as “Nuoshange Si” (諾山格寺) (58). Nuoshange is a direct

transliteration of “Northanger,” with Nuo (諾) representing the sound of “Nor,”

shan (山) of “than,” and ge (格) of “ger.” Si (寺), however, is largely distinguished

from the “Abbey” in Northanger Abbey. In the Chinese language, the word Si is

most commonly used to refer to a Buddhist temple, while “Abbey” in the novel

refers to “a richly-endowed convent at the time of the Reformation” (NA 144).

The historical context of “Northanger Abbey” is an important aspect of the

novel, as it is fundamentally a parody of the Gothic novels. Abbeys and castles are

typical settings in the Gothic novels of late eighteenth-century Britain, and for the

heroine Catherine, who is preoccupied with reading Radcliffe’s Gothic romances,

the very name of Northanger Abbey is “thrilling” (142). Therefore, when Catherine

is invited to visit the Tilneys at Northanger Abbey, she indulges her imagination for

its “long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined chapel” (143). Zheng evidently

understood that an “abbey” was an ancient religious building inhabited by monks or

nuns, like a Buddhist temple in China, and the reason he did not translate it as a

Western monastery is probably that early twentieth-century Chinese readers were

generally unfamiliar with the history of religion in Europe. Buddhism, on the other

hand, has had an enduring influence on Chinese culture since the Han Dynasty (206

BCE-220 CE), and “Si” would have been more easily associated with monks and

nuns in Chinese readers’ imaginations. Nevertheless, temples were built and

restored in different dynasties of China, and it would therefore have been

impossible for Chinese readers to have recognized Northanger Abbey’s connection

to medieval culture and the tradition of Gothic literature that is reflected in the

English title of the novel.

Despite its monastic origins, “Northanger Abbey” is now the Tilneys’ house,

and Catherine’s description of it—its modern furniture, grand fireplace and

handsome marble—makes it harder to call the house a “Si.” However, even today


there is hardly a precise Chinese translation for “abbey.” The “abbey” in

“Westminster Abbey” is commonly rendered as a cathedral—jiaotang (教堂), and

in “Downton Abbey” as a manor house—zhuangyuan (莊園), a Chinese term that is

also used as the translation of “Park” in the title of Austen’s novel Mansfield Park

(曼斯菲爾德莊園 Mansifei’erde Zhuangyuan) (1814). This may help to explain

why later translators still preferred to translate “Abbey” as “Si.” The novel, after all,

is more concerned with the “imagined” abbey than the manor house itself, as the

narrator states for Catherine: “With all the chances against her of house, hall, place,

park, court, and cottage, Northanger turned up an abbey.” (NA 143)

In 1937, Jin Donglei (金東雷) published Historical Outline of English

Literature (英國文學史綱 Yingguowenxue Shigang). Although the book did not

mention Northanger Abbey, it claimed that “Austen had the opposite literary taste to

Ann Radcliffe” (302). Jin most likely compared these two female writers because

he had discussed the Gothic literary tradition earlier in the book, noting that the late

eighteenth century saw a revival of the medieval romance in the new form of tales

of terror, with representative works including Radcliffe’s Udolpho. Jin wrote that

Radcliffe’s works portrayed castles, ghosts, and sentimental heroines, while Austen

was “a great realist writer who focused on depicting English country life” (302).

Jin’s association of Austen’s writing with realism, a literary form that gained much

scholarly attention in the New Culture Movement (新文化運動 xinwenhua

yundong), has had a significant influence on the author’s early reception in China

(Sun, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective” 230-34).

A Chinese edition of William Vaughn Moody and Robert Morss Lovett’s A

History of English Literature (1902) was issued in 1947, translated by Liu Wuji (柳無忌) and Cao Hongzhao (曹鴻昭). In the book, Radcliffe was claimed to be “the

most successful producer of Gothic stories” (226)—Liu and Cao rendered “Gothic”

as “Guxi” (古昔), which means “the very distant past.” Although Guxi reveals the

influence of medieval culture on this literary genre, it hardly presents the main

features of Gothic novels, such as mystery, terror, and darkness, to Chinese readers.

Moody and Lovett criticized Radcliffe and her Gothic school for showing no

historical truth of the past and they regarded Northanger Abbey as Austen’s realistic

reaction against the Gothic genre. However, Chinese readers of the 1940s were

generally unfamiliar with Radcliffe whose novels had not appeared in China by the

time, and it was therefore difficult for them to understand Austen’s exquisite

mastery of irony in Northanger Abbey. This may help explain why Northanger

Abbey failed to capture Chinese translators’ attention during the first half of the

twentieth century, while Austen’s other two works Pride and Prejudice (1813) and

Shuo Sun 215

Emma (1816) were translated into Chinese in 1935 and 1949 respectively.2

Ma Qiaozhi’s Translation of Northanger Abbey

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, its

leaders launched a series of political campaigns across the country to build

socialism. Marxist literary criticism, therefore, exerted a profound impact on the

reception of foreign literature during the 1950s (Zhang 107-08). In 1956, for

example, the Ministry of Higher Education of the PRC released a teaching syllabus

for the history of English literature at Chinese universities. Based on the course

outlines of Moscow State University and Lenin Formal University, the syllabus

represented a typical Marxist assessment of English literature, mainly introducing

English writers who were considered “revolutionary” or “critical” for engaging

their works with the themes of social, political, and economic inequality under

capitalism. William Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), for

example, was praised as “a critique of the social system in a capitalist society” (19).

Although the syllabus noted “a realistic tendency” in Austen’s writing, it criticized

the novelist for having “a limited viewpoint regarding class struggle” (23), which

was largely incited by the lack of depiction of working-class life in her fiction. The

syllabus did not mention Radcliff and Gothic literature, probably because elements

of mystery and the supernatural in Gothic novels were easy to be connected with

“feudalism and superstition” (封建迷信 fengjian mixin) that was attacked by

Marxism and political campaigns of the period.3

In 1958, the first Chinese version of Northanger Abbey was published by the

New Literature and Art Publishing House (新文藝出版社 Xinwenyi chubanshe).4

Ma Qiaozhi (麻喬志) translated the novel based on the English edition that had

been released by Oxford University Press in 1951. The Chinese title of Northanger

Abbey appeared as Nuosangjue Si (諾桑覺寺): “Nuosangjue” (諾桑覺) represented

the sound of “Northanger,” while “Abbey” was still rendered as Si (寺). This was

most likely because, as discussed earlier, Chinese readers were more familiar with

2 Two Chinese versions of Pride and Prejudice were published in 1935, one translated by Yang

Bin (楊繽) and the other by Dong Zhongchi (董仲篪), and Liu Zhongde’s (劉重德) translation of Emma was published in 1949.

3 Jin Donglei, for example, commented that Gothic writers like Horace Walpole were keen on “superstitions and the feudal system” (215) in the Middle Ages, and his remarks may have influenced Chinese critics’ view of Gothic novels in the 1950s.

4 Xinwenyi chubanshe was founded in Shanghai in 1952 and became a major publisher of translated literature in China during the 1950s.


temples than Catholic convents and monasteries. “Nuosangjue Si” has remained the

most widely used Chinese title for the novel today.

Ma produced a relatively faithful translation of the novel, although he tended

to write in a more exaggerated manner. For example, when translating the narrator’s

description of Catherine—“[she] hated confinement and cleanliness” (NA 7)—he

added the Chinese word “zui” (最), which means “most,” to emphasize her

anti-heroine characteristics, resulting in the sentence “[她]最恨待在屋子裡，最不愛清潔” (3). In the following sentence—“But as for General Tilney, I assure you it

would be impossible for anybody to behave to me with greater civility and

attention” (NA 132)—Ma translated “attention” as “yinqin” (殷勤) (105), which has

a more negative undertone than the original word. This change highlights the selfish

motivation behind General Tilney’s exaggerated “kindness” towards Catherine,

which is due to his misunderstanding of the latter’s personal wealth.5 Moreover,

Ma chose to translate the novel with “the strategy of domestication” (Yang, A

Comparative Study 19), largely because Chinese readers of the 1950s were

generally unfamiliar with British culture and customs. For instance, Ma translated

“there was not a genteel face to be seen” (NA 28) as “盡是俗人” (22), choosing the

word “suren” (俗人), meaning “vulgar people,” in order to help Chinese readers

quickly understand the differences between common people and the gentlemen.

Ma certainly recognized Austen’s parody of Gothic conventions in

Northanger Abbey. When the narrator describes Mrs. Allen as one who “will,

probably, contribute to reduce poor Catherine to all the desperate wretchedness of

which a last volume is capable” (NA 12), he added a footnote to his translation

stating that: “In fact, Mrs. Allen has nothing to do with the desperate wretchedness

of Catherine, but in Gothic legend, the heroine’s misfortune is commonly caused by

jealous aunts. This is just the author’s satire of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Udolpho.” (8) Ma

rendered “Gothic novel” as “Ete chuanqi” (峨特傳奇): “Ete” was based on the

English pronunciation of “Gothic” and the term “chuanqi” (legend) refers to

extraordinary stories from ancient times rather than in real life. Ma further

explained in the “Postscript” that Gothic legends, “characterized by mystery and

supernatural horror” (211), were mostly set in the Middle Ages. This certainly

offered Chinese readers a better understanding of the historical context of Gothic

literature.

Ma continued to suggest that although Austen ridiculed in Northanger Abbey

the Gothic novels that prominently featured supernatural elements such as ghosts

5 A more direct rendering of “attention” would be “guanqie” (關切), as was translated by Sun

Zhili.

Shuo Sun 217

and demons, her work, nonetheless, only brought readers back to a small part of the

real world:

她只是把他們帶進她那上流社會的小天地。那個小天地裡的人物，都是些紳士淑女，她們除了談情說愛、作客、野餐、散步、驅車出遊、聊天、跳舞和看書外，似乎就沒有旁的事可做……那裡沒有戰爭，沒有窮困，沒有政治，沒有商業，也沒有激昂的熱情。

She only takes them [readers] to her tiny world of high society, which

is filled with ladies and gentlemen who seem to have nothing to do

except for visiting neighbours, picnicking, walking, travelling on

coaches, chatting, dancing, and reading . . . There is no war, poverty,

politics, business, or passion in that world.6 (212)

Ma’s remarks echoed those of Chinese critics of the first half of the twentieth

century. Xu Mingji (徐名驥), for example, wrote that there was “a lack of heroic

passions and surprising adventures in Austen’s novels” (54). Jin Donglei also

claimed that Austen paid no attention to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic

Wars, and instead, she was most interested in depicting “fascinating picnic and

dance” (302).

However, Austen did not explicitly discuss political issues in her novels

largely because female authorship was still controversial in the late eighteenth

century and women writers were easy targets for conservatives at that time

(Kirkham 44). Austen’s subtle style of irony, therefore, is “an enabling rather than

inhibiting strategy” (Johnson xxv) which gave her an opportunity to condemn the

social and moral restraints women faced in her society. The very name of

Northanger Abbey, as G. K. Chesterton suggested, reveals a “crucial crime of the

sixteenth century” (444)—the Tilneys’ forebears’ robbery of the poor in the

possession of an abbey as a private property. By shaping the master of the house,

General Tilney, as a greedy and materialistic villain who stifles the potential of

women and treats marriage as a commercial transaction, Austen uses the religious

history of Catholic monasteries “to assess the moral fiber of the English

aristocracy” (Moore 126).

6 All translations of quoted passages in this article are by the author.


Ma, however, failed to recognize Austen’s satirical representation of class and

gender issues in Northanger Abbey, and he criticized the novelist for

“unconditionally endorsing” (210) the prevailing moral values of her society. Ma’s

decision to translate Northanger Abbey may have been influenced by the fact that

Wang Keyi’s (王科壹) translation of Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, titled

Aoman Yu Pianjian (傲慢與偏見), achieved immediate popularity upon publication

in 1955 and was republished by the New Literature and Art Publishing House in

1956.7 Wang’s translation represents an important attempt at incorporating Austen’s

work into the Marxist canon at this time, as he endeavoured to present the heroine

of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet, as a rebel against the patriarchal

conventions of her time. However, it would have been difficult for Ma to have

presented Catherine as a strong and intelligent female role model, as Wang did with

Elizabeth, whose liveliness of mind and high spirits have enchanted Chinese readers.

In contrast to Elizabeth, Catherine is much less experienced and rational. For

example, when Catherine is treated rudely by General Tilney, she appears helpless

and vulnerable and is unable to fight against him the way the former heroine does

with upper-class characters such as Lady Catherine.8 It is thus unsurprising that

Catherine was a much less appealing heroine to Chinese readers.

Moreover, by the time Ma’s translation was published in 1958, the

Anti-Rightist Campaign (反右運動 fanyou yundong) (1957) had been launched in

China, targeting “bourgeois” (資產階級 zichanjieji) intellectuals including critics,

writers, and translators.9 It is not surprising, therefore, that Ma’s comments on

Austen were mostly negative. It would have been easy for him to have been

attacked if he had openly praised an English novelist whose works portray the lives

of the landed gentry. In line with the political campaigns of the period, Ma

concluded that Northanger Abbey should be criticized for its “bourgeois viewpoint

on love and relationships” which “treats courtship as the only happiness in life”

(212). Ma’s remarks seem to have had a negative influence on the reception of the

novel, which did not appeare in print in mainland China in the next two decades.

7 Pride and Prejudice, first published in 1813, centers on the misunderstandings and later

mutual enlightenment between Elizabeth Bennet, the second daughter in the Bennet family, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, the aristocratic landowner of Pemberley.

8 In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy’s arrogant aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, tries to stop Elizabeth from marrying her nephew, but Elizabeth refuses to obey her.

9 Some Chinese leaders, most notably Mao Zedong (毛澤東), believed that bourgeois intellectuals had taken advantage of the Hundred Flowers Campaign (百花齊放 baihuaqifang) to promote the growth of “poisonous weeds” rather than “fragrant flowers.” For details, see Kau and Leung (480).

Shuo Sun 219

The Reception of Northanger Abbey in Contemporary China

China’s reform and opening-up policies that were launched under the

leadership of Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) in 1978 brought an economic and cultural

revival to the country. The early 1980s witnessed a surge of translation of Western

literature into Chinese. By 1985, Austen’s six major novels including Sense and

Sensibility (1811), Mansfield Park (1814), and Persuasion (1818) had all been

translated into Chinese and a new edition of Wang Keyi’s Pride and Prejudice and

Liu Zhongde’s Emma had also been released. However, Ma’s translation of

Northanger Abbey failed to attract any interest of book publishers during the 1980s.

This may be because Ma, as discussed above, viewed Austen primarily as a

conservative propagandist, which was exactly what contemporary Chinese scholars

aimed to challenge in the 1980s. In 1982, for example, Zhu Hong introduced the

positive comments on Austen’s novels made by Western critics such as Walter Scott

and Henry James to illustrate the novelist’s significant place in the development of

English literature. In 1984, Gu Jiazu declared that Austen was “one of the most

influential women writers of nineteenth-century Britain” (44) and cited Thomas

Babington Macaulay’s comparison of the author with Shakespeare. Austen’s

reputation had begun to rise considerably in China during this period and scholarly

attention had started to focus on her skilful use of irony and her depiction of gender

and class inequality. It is thus not surprising that book publishers showed no interest

in publishing a translation by Ma, whose assessment of Austen was predominantly

negative. In addition, only a small number of Gothic novels, such as Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein (1818), were published in China during the 1980s, while Radcliff’s

work was left untranslated.

A second Chinese version of Northanger Abbey, by Sun Zhili and Tang

Huixin, appeared in 1986. Sun Zhili’s interest in translating the novel came about

due to his fondness for Austen. He had also translated Sense and Sensibility and

Persuasion in 1984, and would go on to translate Pride and Prejudice in 1990,

Emma in 2001, and Mansfield Park in 2004. In his translation of Northanger Abbey,

Sun used the same Chinese title as Ma, which may have been because the novel

commonly appeared as Nuosangjue Si (諾桑覺寺) in Chinese journal articles of the

1980s.10 Sun’s translation of Northanger Abbey, along with Austen’s other novels,

is characterized by accuracy. Unlike Ma, Sun preferred to adopt foreignization and

10 For example, Yang Jiang (楊絳) (1911-2016) discussed the social function of Austen’s

comedies in 1982 and briefly mentioned that “Austen made fun of Gothic romances in her time by parodying them in Nuosangjue Si” (129).


rarely changed the structure of the original text.11 For example, while Ma translated

“there was not a genteel face to be seen” as “盡是俗人,” Sun rendered the passage

more literally as “見不到壹副優雅的面孔” (27) to convey the subtlety and

originality of Austen’s text.

Sun also noted the significance of vividness in literary translation, and in

Catherine’s conversation with John Thorpe, he rendered the single words

“listening” and “agreeing” (NA 42) as the four-character Chinese idioms “洗耳恭聽” and “隨聲附和” (42). The use of these idioms serves to mock the heroine’s

“feminine” behaviour, which she has adopted through her avid reading of Gothic

novels and her apparently approving response to the sexual politics of female

subordination on display there. Due to the fact that most Chinese readers of the

1980s were unfamiliar with the Gothic novels mentioned in Northanger Abbey,

when translating John Thorpe’s description of Radcliff’s work—“her novels are

amusing enough; they are worth reading: some fun and nature in them” (NA

43)—Sun translated “fun” as “逗趣的內容” (something that provides amusement)

and “nature” as “對大自然的描寫” (description of scenery) (43). This helps

Chinese readers to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of Gothic

novels.12 Later translators like Jin Shaoyu, on the other hand, rendered these two

terms as “很有趣” (very interesting) and “很逼真” (very lifelike) (47), which

seems less accurate.

Northanger Abbey’s thematical connection to Gothic fiction has been of great

interest to Sun. In 1988, he noted that Anglo-American scholars hold different

opinions on whether Austen’s satire was directed against the Gothic genre, citing

critical reviews of the novel by Marvin Mudrick and Alan D. Mackillop. Sun

portrayed Northanger Abbey as mainly a criticism of the Gothic romances

popularized in Austen’s time and he explored the “anti-Gothic” (反哥特 fan Gete)

elements of the novel by analysing its character development and plot structure,

commenting:

小說著重揭示了女主角的哥特夢幻與現實之前的矛盾，進而諷刺了哥特小說的故弄玄虛與脫離現實。

The novel focuses on revealing the contradiction between the

11 For a comparison of Sun’s and Ma’s translations of Northanger Abbey, see Yang’s A

Comparative Study. 12 For Sun’s discussions on his translation of Northanger Abbey, see his “Translation of

Abstract Nouns.”

Shuo Sun 221

heroine’s Gothic fantasy and reality, aiming to satirize Gothic

fiction’s use of the supernatural and its disconnection from reality.

(“Part One” 83)

Sun suggested that the main reason for Austen’s disapproval of the Gothic novels is

that they did not seek to depict the world and people as they really are. He placed

Austen in the realistic tradition represented by Henry Fielding and considered her

“a great realist writer” (“Part One” 35), which has had a significant influence on the

contemporary reception of Austen and Northanger Abbey in China.

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a continuous rise in the degree of critical

attention paid to Northanger Abbey and the Gothic novel. Wang Xiaoqin, for

example, introduced the major writers in Gothic literature including Horace

Walpole, Matthew G. Lewis, and Radcliffe, and referred to Northanger Abbey as “a

mild Gothic parody” (46). She offered a brief analysis of the complex meaning of

the term “Gothic,” stating that it originally meant “barbarian” but also referred to

the style of architecture or fiction with imaginative elements inspired by the

medieval periods. The Chinese translation of “Gothic” appeared in this article as

“Gete shi” (哥特式)—Gete was rendered according to the English pronunciation of

“Gothic” and “shi” means “style.”13 Wang pointed out that although Austen wrote

in the Romantic era, the novelist supported rationalism. Contemporary

Anglo-American critics’ views of Gothic fiction seem to have had a great impact on

Chinese critics. Coral Ann Howells, for example, compared Radcliffe with Austen,

claiming that the former writer celebrates the pleasures of sentimental indulgence

while the latter stresses that rational judgment is more reliable than feelings in

decision making (47). Wang also referred to Brendan Hennessey’s notion that the

major poets of the Romantic period, such as Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron,

generally held positive opinions of Radcliffe.

In 1995, Pan Weixin commented that although Northanger Abbey had not yet

achieved much popularity in China, it was a great novel for its realism:

奧斯丁在批判哥特小說的同時，使自己創作的小說向現實主義的方向又大大地前進了一步……這種更高層次，更新境界的小說創

13 The term “Gete shi” first appeared in 1959, in Dai Liuling and Cai Wenxian’s Chinese

edition of Alexander Anikst’s An Outline History of English Literature (17). Due to the fact that it is difficult to provide a neat definition of “Gothic,” “Gete shi” has become the most widely used Chinese translation in recent decades.


作，為真正上的現實主義作品開拓了輝煌的前景。

While criticizing Gothic novels, Austen took her novels one large

step towards realism … This marks a higher level of novel writing

and has opened up a new prospect for realistic works in a true sense.

(76)

Pan noted Austen’s satirical tone towards Gothic fiction’s unrealistic characters and

adventures in Northanger Abbey, and like Sun Zhili, he regarded Austen’s faithful

portrayal of commonplace life to have paved the way for nineteenth-century literary

realism.

However, despite Pan’s warm praise of Northanger Abbey, it remained one of

the least popular of Austen’s novels in China throughout the 1990s, during which

time at least five more translations of Pride and Prejudice, four of Emma, three of

Sense and Sensibility, two of Persuasion, and one of Mansfield Park were released,

but none of Northanger Abbey, with only a reprint of Sun’s translation being issued

in 1997. Indeed, Chinese critics’ exploration of the novel was closely related to that

of Gothic fiction during the 1980s and 1990s, and yet translations of the

representative Gothic works discussed in the novel, notably those by Radcliffe,

were not available to Chinese readers at the time.

In 2004, the first Chinese version of Radcliffe’s Udolpho, translated by Liu

Bo, was published by China Renmin University Press as part of the “magical

classic” series. This was closely connected with the significant popularity of

“magical” books, particularly the Harry Potter novels, in China. 14 Liu also

translated Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (1796), another work mentioned by

Austen in Northanger Abbey, and Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), both of which

were included in the “magical classic” series.15 Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto

(1764) appeared in at least three Chinese versions during the 2000s. Following the

appearance of these Gothic novels in China, critical interest surrounding the parody

(戲仿 xifang) of the Gothic genre in Northanger Abbey has grown. Recent Chinese

14 Udolpho was described, on the front cover of Liu’s translation, as a classical work of

“magical fantasy” that was a significant inspiration for the Harry Potter series and The Lord of the Rings series (see Title Page of The Mysteries). Although this statement failed to connect the imagination of Chinese readers with the Gothic tradition, it certainly helped emphasize the mystery and darkness of Radcliffe’s story. This is likely because Radcliffe and her contemporary Gothic writers were still not familiar to Chinese readers at this time, so a connection between her works and the Harry Potter series would have helped the book attract attention and sell.

15 For the publication and reception of Gothic novels in contemporary China, see Yu (75-76).

Shuo Sun 223

critical reviews of the novel show the complexity of Austen’s parody. Zheng

Baiqing, for example, explored the reflexivity of parody in Northanger Abbey,

claiming that Austen imitated Gothic novels in a comic way to inherit and preserve

the Gothic tradition. According to Zheng, the narrative of Eleanor Tilney’s husband

at the end of the novel makes the work itself “a potential object of parody, which

constitutes the novel’s self-parody” (89).

Liu Xiamin, however, suggested that within the framework of Gothic fiction,

the main themes in Northanger Abbey are, in fact, female education and reading.

She argued that Catherine learns more about the society in her reading of Gothic

romances and Austen “defends the fiction including the Gothic” (62). Austen

famously challenged, in Northanger Abbey, the prejudiced opinion of the novel as

an inferior art form and defended the capability of female authors.

Nineteenth-century British critics’ periodic disapproval toward the novel was

closely related to the common view of the genre as a “feminine preserve.”16 In

Northanger Abbey, Austen openly praises the work of Fanny Burney (1752-1840),

one of the most prominent female novelists of her time, through the voice of the

narrator who claims that Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796) display “the greatest

powers of the mind” (NA 31). Austen benefited from Burney’s attempt at creating a

realistic portrayal of the society, and there are remarkable thematic parallels

between their novels in exploring the relationship between feeling and reason in

guiding female conduct (Chisholm 101; Baker 510).

In recent years, both Chinese and Anglo-American critics have widely

discussed Austen’s interest in female education. For instance, Li Xiawei echoed Liu

Xiamin’s remarks about Austen’s defence of the educational value of fiction. Li

claimed that Catherine’s growing up at the end of the novels indicates that even

Gothic novels “may turn out to be educational, when read in the proper way” (29).

Rachel M. Brownstein, however, regarded those Gothic novels that Catherine read

to reflect society’s expectations of women. Brownstein argued that Austen

resembles Simone de Beauvoir in her view that “social and literary conventions

collaborate with biology to construct femininity” (36). Wen Liqiu, on the other hand,

explored the metaphor of places in Northanger Abbey and regarded Bath and the

horrible abbey that inspired Catherine’s Gothic illusion as a symbol of victimized

“women’s imprisonment in a patriarchal society” (196). Wen also pointed out that

16 R. H. Hutton wrote in 1858 that “feminine ability has found for itself a far more suitable

sphere in novel-writing than in any other branch of literature” and he suggested that Austen’s novels and those of other female writers such as Maria Edgeworth and Charlotte Brontë lacked “the broad intellectual framework of masculine novels.” See Hutton (466-81).


the female Gothic of Austen’s time played a significant role in promoting the

development of women’s literature and inspired many great novels by women

writers such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

(1847), and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847).

These accounts of Gothic fiction and female education in Northanger Abbey

have helped to generate more interest among general Chinese readers in the novel.

In 2007, Chongqing Publishing House reprinted Ma’s translation of Northanger

Abbey, which includes a Chinese version of Marilyn Butler’s introduction to the

Penguin Classics edition of the novel (1995). Unlike Ma’s commentary, Butler’s

remarks on the novel were mostly positive, declaring that “Northanger Abbey,

playful, youthful and warm, is nearer than the others to Pride and Prejudice in its

reliance on dialogue, but it is older, more experimental, far more challenging in

respect of their medium” (xvi). Butler suggested that both Romantic and classical

traditions were used in Northanger Abbey. Jin Shaoyu’s version of Northanger

Abbey, first published by Shanghai Translation Press in 2000, was reprinted twice in

2008 and 2010. Of all the Chinese versions of Northanger Abbey, Sun Zhili’s

translation seems to have been the most widely read and has been reprinted at least

six times over the past twenty years.17 Northanger Abbey thus has the potential to

gain more critical attention and popularity in the decades to come.

Conclusion

In recent decades, Austen has rapidly gained popularity in China, yet there are

large differences in the reception of her six major novels. This article has explored

the Chinese reception of Northanger Abbey, which is among the least popular of

Austen’s work and thus largely ignored by contemporary critics. Northanger Abbey

is notable for its satirizing parody of the Gothic novels represented by Radcliff.

However, when Ma Qiaozhi produced its first Chinese translation in 1958, he

overlooked the novel’s Gothic elements, which are crucial in understanding

Austen’s subtle criticism of social and gender issues, in his desire to explore class

struggle. Heavily influenced by political ideologies of the 1950s that placed

Marxism in the central place, Ma’s interpretation of the novel has had a negative

17 General readers’ responses to the translations of Northanger Abbey can be found on Douban

(<https://book.douban.com/subject/>), one of China’s largest social media platforms that allow users to share book and film reviews. According to the most recent result on this website, 151 readers reviewed Ma’s 2007 edition of the novel, while 1,342 readers responded to Sun’s 1997 edition with 44.2% of them rating it 4 stars (the second highest rating) and 17.7% 5 stars (the highest rating), giving the latter book average review score of 7.5 out of 10.

Shuo Sun 225

influence on its contemporary reception in China.

Following the new wave of literature translation in the early 1980s, Chinese

critics started to pay increasing attention to Austen’s literary achievement,

particularly her mastery of language and her ironic representation of social manners.

This article has argued that an adequate reading of Northanger Abbey, however,

relies on specific historical and literary contexts, and a knowledge of Gothic

fiction’s common use of plot, setting, and character is more crucial than language

and dialogue in understanding the parody in the novel. Therefore, only a few

Chinese scholars, most notably Sun Zhili, can be said to have paid proper attention

to Northanger Abbey before the late 1990s. Moreover, the Gothic novels mentioned

in the book by Austen remained untranslated in China during the twentieth century.

Over the past two decades, however, an increasing number of Gothic novels,

including those by Radcliffe, Walpole, and Lewis, have been translated into Chinese,

and Chinese readers are therefore becoming more familiar with the form and

conventions of Gothic literature. Although Northanger Abbey is still relatively

unpopular in China, recent critics have exhibited an increasing interest in exploring

the complexity of Austen’s Gothic parody in connection with her viewpoint on

women’s education, as expressed in the novel, which will surely lead to Chinese

readers being offered greater insights into the value of this work.

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Shuo Sun 229

About the Author Shuo Sun obtained her PhD degree in English Literature from the University of Nottingham

in 2016 and her MA degree in Victoria Literature from the University of Liverpool in 2011.

She is currently a lecturer in English Studies at China University of Petroleum (East China).

Her research focus has been on cross-cultural studies of Jane Austen and other

nineteenth-century British women writers.

[Received 15 July 2020; accepted 1 February 2021]

jane austen and the gothic novels: the reception of

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