CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION..
p.2
Chapter 1: Jane Austen and the Modern Novel ..
.... p.5
1.1 Austens Life . p.5
1.2 Austens Career as a Writer p.5
1.3 The Janeite Fan Culture.. p.9
1.4 Austen's Moral Teaching...
p.10
1.5 Austen s New Kind of Fiction...... p.13
1.6 Northanger Abbey....... p.15
Chapter 2: Ian McEwan and the Art of Unease..
..... p.24
2.1 Englands National Author......
p.24
2.2 I'm an Atheist....
p.26
2.3 Atonement Critical Acclaim.......
....p.29
2.4 Atonement Time and Place....
..p.29
2.5 Atonement Story ......
..p.30
2.6 Major Themes in
Atonement.....p.33
2.7 A Study in Cognitive Psychology.p.36

Chapter 3: Austens Northanger Abbey and McEwan's Atonement ...

p.41
3.1 The Presence of the Epigraph .....
p.41
3.2 Similarities ......
p.44
3.3 Differences.......
p.48
3.4 The Role of Fiction - a Motif Behind Action .....
p.50
CONCLUSIONS .p.
57
BIBLIOGRAPHY: ...
p.60

INTRODUCTION
Motto: "I love England in a heat wave () It's a different country. All the rules change."
(Leon Tallis, Atonement)

We live in an age where the novels cultural importance has decreased conspicuously. The
number of university students enrolled in literature departments has fallen at the same
time as novels find themselves competing with film, television, and digital media for the
attentions of those who continue to pursue humanities degrees. Yet, some novelists like
Jane Austen and Ian McEwan are not only well-read but culturally present, to an extent
that other classic writers are not. It is worth asking why we face up to this state of affairs;
and why Jane Austen (whose Northanger Abbey has inspired Ian McEwans Atonement a novel which The Observer cites as one of the 100 best novels written, calling it "a
contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction1, which, at the same time is
1

http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk

said to bring the British novel into the 21st century 2), is alive and best selling in
nowadays literature, not so much in order to value Austen more deeply, but in order to see
what cultural life and influence on our mind the novel may still have.
On the one hand, Jane Austen is said to be someone outside the norm, one of the few
people in history that have managed to create something so unique and avant-garde that is
without precedent or successor. Northanger Abbey is said to have broken ground
because it contrasts the terrors of the imagination and the more
interesting reality, a thing that the more complex, postmodernist
psychological novels like Atonement are sure to do, as well, although
they are in many ways poles apart from hers, exploring the impact on
commonplace people of appalling situations, as they face sudden hostility, or slip into
heightened and delicate psychological states. However, we sense that both Austen and Ian
McEwan perceive art as self-contained, supported by its own internal struts and beams,
resembling the world, but somehow immune from it. 3

On the other hand, both novels include a documentary quality and a reflective,
ethical and philosophical engagement with the society and its values. Like Jane Austen,
Ian McEwan became a writer by being a reader. Thus, by reading a lot, both authors
understand that the human beings have an essential need for ethical orientation which is
of particular significance in our world, characterised by unforeseen events and change.
The central role of change in their writings makes us perceive that rather than arguing for
normative codes of behaviour or concepts of virtue, and high merit, they both understand
ethics in terms of the interactive encounters between people. In consequence, their fiction
take part in the current debate about the influence of literature on the human mind, as
well as the relationship between literature and ethics.

In his latest book Atonement Ian McEwan brings the British novel into the 21st century, says Geoff
Dyer, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/22/fiction.ianmcewan
3
Author Statement http://literature.britishcouncil.org/ian-mcewan

My purpose in this paper is, therefore, to discover why Jane Austen and Ian McEwan
whose creative imagination and versatility look similar in certain ways, each of them
being a genius at creating suspense. I would like to see why some people let themselves
influenced by them in a time when we are all busy doing other things than reading.
Maybe in this way I will also understand the influence literature has in general on the
human mind and in particular in the above mentioned novels and if it can really
manipulate our intuitive world, our psychic and our space. I feel interested in finding out
if it is true what Ian McEwan said once, namely that "there are ways in which art can
have a longer reach than politics.4 We would really like to know if the imagined and the
real are ever able to be as one.
However, I will proceed by reviewing basic things in trying to compare these atypical
works of art, both much admired, touchy and contentious: Northanger Abbey
which is, as Austen herself stated when defining the novel, 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
humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language5 and Atonement, where
one can find oneself, look for dialogue, engagement and for ways in which literature,
especially fiction, with its impulse to enter other minds, can reach across political
divides.6 These are powerful statements of the novels role of re-creating the world.
First, I ought to revise some essential things about Jane Austen and see why people still
love her novels and their adaptations into films quite so much, what makes one appreciate
her the pure absorption, the tense involvedness of her scenes and exchanges in her
works; or her irony which leaves so much room for argument about a particular
characters habits and exploits; her moral education or the necessity of making moral
4

McEwan, Ian "Israel critics should respect my decision", The Guardian, 26 January, 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/26/critics-should-respect-my-decision
5

Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, Chapter 5, www.pemberley.com/etext/NA/chapter5.htm,

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/121

McEwan, Ian "Israel critics should respect my decision" The Guardian, 26 January 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/26/critics-should-respect-my-decision

judgments, of thinking and talking them through after reading novels like Northanger
Abbey?
Second, I will revise things about who Ian McEwan really is. I would like to discover
why he is a noteworthy contemporary writer, and why his work retains a distinctive
character, best summed up in Kiernan Ryans phrase, the art of unease7 and most of all,
I would like to know why he refers to Atonement as my Jane Austen novel, my country
house novel, my one-hot-day novel.8 If McEwan recognizes using the book as a bounce
for his work, where does he get his inspiration for the plot, as well as his character,
Briony?
Overall, my paper will try to demonstrate that Austens Northanger Abbey and McEwans
Atonement, are not just best selling and marketable but also valuable and influential
books which push us back towards real life with new ways of thinking and understanding
it.

Chapter 1: Jane Austen and the Modern Novel

1.1 Austens Life
Raised in a family of eight children, Jane Austen was born in December 1775 in
Stevenson, Hampshire, England. She was schooled mainly at home and benefitted from a
full and happy life as her parents approved their children to see the sights and the
wonders of knowledge. She enjoyed reading, dancing, walking around the countryside
and had many friends, her time in Hampshire being truly heaven on earth for her.
Her situation became dire when her family decided to move to Bath in 1801 and soon her
father died. The Austen brothers replaced him on the economic front to support her, their
mother and their other sister. Her fathers loss brought several years of financial difficulty
for the three women, but eventually, in 1809, Janes brother Edward gave them his old
7

Kiernan Ryan, http://literature.britishcouncil.org/ian-mcewan

Kelloway, Kate, At home with his worries, The Observer, Sunday, 16 September, 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/16/fiction.ianmcewan

estate in Chawton, Hampshire. This is where Jane Austen spent the rest of her remaining
life as part of the lower fringes of English gentry.
Outwardly, her life was monotonous; she did not marry, even though she had several
suitors, one of whom she accepted one evening, only to change her mind the following
morning. She died from Addisons disease, in July 18, 1817.
Austen's personal life has been adapted into film, television, and theater. Becoming Jane,
based on the biography written by Jon Hunter Spence, shows her early life, her
development as an author, and the posited romantic relationship with Thomas Langlois
Lefroy (James McAvoy). Miss Austen Regrets, based on Austen's surviving letters,
focuses on the last few years of Jane Austen's life as she looked back on her life and loves
and helped her favorite niece, Fanny Knight find a husband.

1.2 Austens Career as a Writer

Jane Austens creative apprenticeship lasted from her adolescence until she was about
thirty-five years old. Throughout this period, she tried out various literary forms,
including the epistolary novel which she aimed at and then deserted, and wrote and
adjusted three major novels and began a fourth.
As early as 1787, Austen began to write poems, stories, and plays for her own and her
family's amusement. They are now referred to as the Juvenilia; she carried on working on
these pieces as late as the period 18091811, and there is evidence that her niece and
nephew, Anna and James Edward Austen, made further additions as late as 1814. Among
these works are a satirical novel in letters entitled Love and Freindship in which she
ridiculed popular novels of deep feeling, and The History of England, which pokes fun at
popular historical writing.
During her time at Chawton, Jane Austen successfully published four novels, which were
generally well-received. From 1811 until 1816, with the publishing of Sense and
Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816),

Austen became more and more renowned. She wrote two more novels, Northanger
Abbey (actually her first novel, written between 1797 1798) and Persuasion both
published after her death and began a third one, which in due course was titled Sanditon,
but the author died before completing it.
Jane Austen is described by many critics as one of the most widely read and most beloved
writer in English literature because of her realism, bitter social commentary and masterful
use of free indirect speech, burlesque, and the specific irony used in order to highlight
and mock the lifestyle and ideals of the high-born.
Contemporary readers do not need explanation of Austen's milieu-Georgian and Regency
Britain to comprehend and enjoy her fiction because the author herself presents that by
weaving together cautiously researched biographical information, meticulous rendering
of everything - from social ladder to makeup and hygiene, as well as feedbacks to her
novels. Therefore, I think its easy for us to step back in time while reading Austen and
experience the world of Jane Austen's enduringly popular fiction describing luxurious
country houses and poor villagers' cottages, ceremonial dinners or intimate and cherished
family evening meals, the streets of Bath or the Cobb at Lyme Regis. She put in writing
significant things about the faults of this society like the hunt for a rich husband, women
merely being pretty little ornaments for a man to have, as she so humorously writes in
Northanger Abbey A woman, especially if she has the misfortune of knowing anything,
should conceal it as well as she can. We might say it like this today: If you want to
catch a rich husband you have to sit silent and look appealing.
When it comes about the political and historical context of Jane Austens work, on the
one hand we can say that she started her career at a time when the society was in a
political turmoil as monarchies were restless and the fear of war outbreaks engulfed the
population. Right after the French revolution and the change in regime, England declared
war on France and the conflict continued until Napoleons defeat at Waterloo. In fear of
propaganda and anti-monarchic movements, laws were strictly imposed upon the public.

One of these changes involved the censorship of literature that was meant to prevent
hidden rebellious ideas from spreading.
On the one hand, the society of the late 18 th century and beginning of the 19th century was
still regarded as a patriarchy and was differentiated based on wealth, rank and position.
Families were like dynasties, and each had the moral and social obligation to honour
their respective bloodline and ensure its longevity across generations 9. In that day and
age, name and status meant everything. The world was ruled by men. Women had no civil
rights and held no positions. If a woman had dared to dream of making a name for her or
deviated from what was expected from her, demanded behaviour, lost respectability, she
would have been repudiated from societys good graces and regarded as a bad influence
and harbinger of shame and disrespect towards her family and the good men that had the
obligation and were destined to lead.10 Here I cannot retain myself from observing that
unfortunately, it still looks like our 21st century Romanian societyat least in some parts
of it.
Jane Austen understood the hopes and fears of women who had to rely on marriage and
family connections to provide them with a home and means to live. She was fortunate in
having the support of her family and a successful literary career, but she knew how easy
it would be to become a tedious Miss Bates, a pitiable Jane Fairfax, or a sickly and
forgotten Mrs Smith. Already stuck in a gender discriminating circle, and with the
unfurling of the Napoleonic war, she felt that social and somehow political loop became
one of her problems in publishing her work. Therefore, Austen published anonymously as
"A Lady" and her works brought her little personal renown. In her own lifetime she was
not overtly known as a writer among writers although she had a bighearted critic in Sir
Walter Scott. If her work was read in any way - she was out of print for 12 years - it used
to be considered as being on the female margins of literature.
Only after the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen was she
introduced to a wider public. However, once she managed to reach the public, her
9

Rachel M. Brownstein, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, The Cambridge
Companion to Jane Austen, eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997,
p. 35-36.
10
idem

writings gradually gained acceptance and reverence in the public eye. As she was
declaring mutiny to the norms of society, Britain would soon go through the industrial
revolution, the event that would transform the image and position of England forever.
Then the literary elite felt that they had to disconnect their admiration of Austen from that
of the masses and consequently, and by the 1940s she became acknowledged in academia
as a great English writer.
The enormous popularity of Jane Austen's novels has led to many movie and television
adaptions of her novels, beginning with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson in the 1940
version of Pride and Prejudice, continuing to the nearly legendary wet shirt of Colin
Firth as Mr Darcy in the 1995 BBC mini-series, and now including Bollywood musicals
and zombies. In recent years, there has been an explosion of popular novels based on
Jane Austen and her works.11

1.3 The Janeite Fan Culture

The second half of the 20th century saw the coming out of a Janeite fan culture. The term
has been both embraced by followers of the works of Jane Austen, and well as used as a
term of opprobrium. Conceived by George Saintsbury in his 1894 introduction to Pride
and Prejudice, this word was needed to refer to the enthusiasm shared among publishers,
professors, and literati like Rudyard Kipling who even published a short story entitled
The Janeites about a group of World War I soldiers who, in secret, were great fans of
Austen's novels. If by the 1940s Austen's writings were consecrated within the academy,
the term Janeite began to alter in its significance, being used also by those who
appreciated Austen in the "wrong" way.
They say that Janeites are like members of a sect, marginalized by dominant cultural
institutions, turned on legitimizing their own objectives and protocols of proficiency.
11

http://www.austen.com/

Some scholars indicate their ludic keenness, manifest in amateur reading clubs,
preoccupied by teas, costume balls, games, readings, and dramatic representations,
fabrics, genealogies, and weekend study trips. Deidre Lynch, for example, even argues
that such activities provide "a kind of time-travel to the past, because they preserve an all
but vanished Englishness or set of 'traditional' values.... 12
The fans of Jane Austen among whom I mention Ernest Hemingway, Anthony Trollope,
Sir Walter Scott know that in Jane Austen's day, the late 1700's and early 1800's, a lady's
given name was used only by her family and very close friends. Jane Austen's fans
consider themselves intimates of Jane Austen and of her characters, who they know in
their heads are fictional and in their hearts are real. This demonstrates the influence of
Austen's work of fiction by which readers might go home again, to a world where they
feel good and relaxed, where the imagined and the real, though not always in harmony,
give them the soothing state of belonging to a tradition, to a cultural and moral identity.
1.4 Austen's Moral Teaching
Martha Nussbaum, a renowned American philosopher, explains13 that
literature has an indirect role in moral education because it helps
readers to develop and practice the ethical skill of sympathising with
other people, other lives and other perspectives. As we tell stories about
the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response
to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn
something about ourselves.14 Austen is an example of how a writer
influences people by writing as a truth-seeker who analyses and
teaches moral principles for middle-class life. She has kept on
impressing readers and has remained startlingly contemporary.
12

Lynch, Deidre, "Cult of Jane Austen", Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005, p.114
13

Nussbaum, Martha Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, p.177
14
http://www.egs.edu/library/martha-nussbaum/biography/

10

Austen's moral education consists in her power of analysing and

teaching a virtue ethics for bourgeois life, the kind of life that most of
us live or wish to live today. It actually concerns the question: how
should I live my life? When answering it, one must identify the virtues
one should develop and the path to achieving them. Unless we are
trapped by a subsistence economy, we have the resources and time the leisure - to reflect on who we want to be and to make and carry out
plans for our future.
What she did, she did perfectly. Her work, as far as it goes, is faultless. She wrote of the
times in which she lived, of the class of people with which she associated, and in the
language which was usual to her as an educated lady. Of romance, -- what we generally
mean when we speak of romance -- she had no tinge. Heroes and heroines with
wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes
she tells us nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us
while she tells us with an unconscious accuracy how men should act to women, and
women act to men. It is not that her people are all good; -- and, certainly, they are not all
wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till
they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly I know no novelist who has beaten her. 15
Austen endorses a solidly middle-class ethics, and by using it in her narrative she
enlightens why success for Austen's women depends on developing a moral character
whose central desirable qualities are bourgeois: prudence, civility to family, friends, and
strangers, propriety and acting on a sense of what virtue requires, dignity and respect.
She presents these qualities as not just a necessary adaptation to
difficult situations, but as superior to the offensive conceit of the rich
and titled, which she often derides. She is a good educator because
she proceeds by giving illustrative examples and makes her point clear.
15

Trollope, Anthony, Lecture on Jane Austen, 1870,

http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/janeart.html#dfensnovl

11

Throughout all [Jane Austen's] works, a sweet lesson of homely household womanly
virtue is ever being taught."16
As regards her characters, Austen's rationale is not to explore their inner
lives, but to picture particular moral pathologies. As an omniscient
author, she sees right through people, recognizes their moral fiber and
dissects their recklessness, madness, stupidity or self-deception. Her
moral values are quite domestic, without concern either for the civic virtues like justice or
the condition of those outside the limited circle of acquaintances - the war, the slavery,
although her description is adapted to the bourgeois post-enlightenment world she lived
in. But she limits herself to examining a few basic features of a particular setting rather
than dealing with the universal concepts pervasive in her time.
We might as well say that Austen's characters have to face the unpleasant attentions and
comments of boors, fools, and cads with etiquette and seemliness. The most important
women in her novels, like Emma or Catherine, are always clever and humorous, strongminded and prepared to face the censure and displeasure of society, ready to fight with
the intention of shielding their own feelings or principles.
In all of Jane Austens novels, starting with Northanger Abbey we become aware of the
strength and independence of the main characters. We realise that almost all the women
she portrays are a reflection of herself, and they are always witty, determined and
prepared to face the disapproval of society. They fight to defend their own feelings or
ideals and always manage to reach their goals and find happiness without shedding their
beliefs and succumbing to influence. Moreover, because they always stand their ground
at the end, the author grants them a blissful ending because they succeed in proving the
society wrong when it comes to social behaviourism and conformity.
Jane Austen does her duty of moral education with elegance and
intensity, valuing her readers interests and capacities. In point of fact
16

idem

12

this is what makes her more readable than most moral theorists who
only seem to put pen to paper as if understanding is the reader's
problem. Hers is virtue ethics at a different level: it is about moral
vision, not just moral content. This authoress shows us how to look at
ourselves and study our own personality so as we should meet
Socrates' precept "know thyself". And we certainly have all the
information we could do with to look at ourselves in this way. It is
important to perceive ourselves as we really are in order to make the
right choices in love and in marriage, and we have an author's
omniscient right to use to the facets of our own lives.
In conclusion, Jane Austen has much to teach the professional
philosopher as well as the casual reader about moral philosophy.
Academic moral philosophers since the enlightenment have
collaborated with our natural aversion to introspection by collectively
turning their attention away from uncomfortable self-examination and
towards elaborating coherent systems of rules that any agent should
follow. Yet reading Austen shows the ultimate ineffectiveness of this
strategy.17
Without a doubt Austen was a bright moralist from whom we still have
so much to learn at present. Her books are totally serious morality
plays beneath the thin covering of romantic comedy that helped them
sell. They are moral education camouflaged as entertainment.
1.5 Austen s New Kind of Fiction
Histories of the British literature make it clear that in the last decades of the 18th century
and the first decades of the 19th century when the novel became the dominant form of
Western literature, Jane Austens works show a mind of the shrewdest intelligence
17

Thomas Rodham, Read3ing Jane Austen as a moral philosopher,

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2011/08/jane-austen-terrible-novelist-brilliant.html

13

adapting the available traditions and deepening the resources of art with consummate
craftsmanship.18 Many also advocate that Jane Austen, contemplating and satirizing life
in Regency England, initiated the highly structured and polished novel of manners which
is meant to deal with the domestic affairs of English country gentry families of the 19th
century and ignore elemental human passions and larger social and political
determinations.19
Obviously, Jane Austen occupies no one place because she neither fits in the NeoClassicist movement - which was the most important literary movement of the 1700s nor
is she a member of the Romantic faction, her plots being too involved with society and
human interaction to fit within the Romantic genre. Austen's stress on manners and on the
positive and negative aspects of rigid British social norms, is comparable to the
prominence of the Victorian writers half a century later. Her novels, part of the
progressive development of British fiction, cannot be classified as belonging to any
specific literary trend.
Jane Austen is different from other writers of her time also because her main interest is in
the moral, social and psychological behaviour of her characters. She is said to have
anticipated the modern realistic psychological novel.20 Her pictures are original being
detailed and often ironic. In recent years, academic interest in Austen has focused more
closely on her literary technique. Thus, the critic John Mullan states that her brilliance is
in the style,21 and not the content. According to James Wood, another contemporary
literary scholar, we should assign Austens primary importance to her invention of free
indirect discourse, whereby the voices of a novels characters are allowed to inflect or
even take over the narration itself. This is perhaps one of the reasons for which Austen is
so popular today: many readers think that free indirect discourse is just what novels
sound like.

18

Coote, Stephen, The Penguin Short History of English Literature, Penguin Books, London, 1993, p. 374
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/362568/novel-of-manners
20
Grigorescu, Dan, Prefata la Mandrie si prejudecata, Leda, Bucuresti, 2007, p.12
21
Mullan, John, What Matters in Jane Austen: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved, Bloomsbury Publishing,
2012, p.42
19

14

Besides, it seems that the use of irony makes way for thinking and talking arguments
through. It seems that nowadays cultural climate can easily be penetrated by irony and
that it is governed, in some measure, by two forms of amusement which only seem right
in the context of sound social judgment. The first is the self-help book, which asks
readers to assess themselves and the later is reality television, where the viewing pleasure
comes from judging the people on screen. Jane Austen could not be a better fit.
It is no coincidence that the most exciting English-language novel of the last 12 months
is also explicitly inspired by self-help. Sheila Hetis How Should A Person Be? is a novel
which combines fact with fiction and, like Austen, hazards occasional accusations of
preciousness for the sake of directly addressing this question: what kind of a life should
one decide to live? (The emphasis being on the word decide.) This kind of evaluative
introspection remains one of the few areas in which the novel retains something of a
competitive edge over rival narrative art forms. For pure entertainment value, television
and film left novels in the dust some time ago. The excitement has long gone out of
modernist formal innovation and experiment. But novels can still suggest habits of living
in the ideal setting, which is to say in private, with words the reader only hears in his or
her own head.22
Austen's sympathetic approach to the emotion of story, her dexterity of writing, and the
intricacy of the human condition, her many-sided, genuine environment full of issues like
sisterhood, age, sex, money, illness, death, holidays, accidents, weather, marriage
proposals, appropriate conversation and loads more as well as her main characters
profundity and passion reveal her technical virtuosity and sheer daring as a novelist who
can give us all fresh eyes to see our world and ourselves better.
1.6 Northanger Abbey
16.1 General Presentation

22

Beck, Richard, Cult Leader, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/jane-austen-popular-21stcentury/

15

Jane Austens very first novel was originally entitled Susan, and represented the name
of the main character. However, after revising the story she changed the protagonists
name to Catherine and named the book: Northanger Abbey. As an early piece, this novel
written when she was in her early twenties, is not as masterfully executed as her later
novels, lacking her finesse her distinctive style Furthermore, the irony in this book is
most observable and inflated while the storyline is not as complex and composite as in
her other writings.
If truth be told, this novel is to many readers a comic love story set in Bath about a young
reader who must learn how to separate fantasy from reality. There is a youthful gaiety,
almost jollity, about the work, a touch of something very near to farce, which appears in
none of the other novels. () Northanger Abbey has more in it of the spirit of
youthfulness than any of the other novels. Its idea was, apparently, intended to be the
contrast between a normal, healthy-natured girl and the romantic heroines of fiction; and,
by showing the girl slightly affected with romantic notions, Jane Austen exhibits the
contrast between the world as it is and the world as imagined by the romancers whom she
wished to ridicule.23
In fact, we may say that Northanger Abbey is an ironic parody of both Gothic novels and
unsophisticated romances that were popular in this period. It also satirizes the conduct
books of the 1700s, books that informed children and young people how to behave in
society. Executed with high-spirited gusto, Northanger Abbey is the most lighthearted of
Jane Austens novels, yet at its core this delightful novel is a serious, unsentimental
commentary on love and marriage.24
By contrast with Jane Austens works, Gothic novels contained stories which were
macabre, fantastic and supernatural, usually set in haunted castles, graveyards, ruins and
wild landscapes. They reached their height of their fashion in the 1790s and the early

23

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (190721) , Volume X Jane
Austen, 3. Northanger Abbey, http://www.bartleby.com/222/1003.html
24

Mac Adam, Alfred, Introdution to Northanger Abbey

16

years of the nineteenth century. The first Gothic novel was The Castle of Ontrato (1764),
by Horace Walpole.
Jane Austen satirized the genre in Northanger Abbey, revealing her shrew irony and her
profound sense of the drama of daily life rooted in the conservative realities of social
existence.25 By creating this novel she proved that she lacked the superficiality and the
Philistine nature that other writings of the time had. In fact she started a revolution when
it comes to the literature of her time and the social context of her life and began to be one
of the few people in history that have managed to create something unique and avantgarde that is without precedent or successor. In many peoples opinion, world literature is
definitely better with the writerly existence of Jane Austen.
Although Northanger Abbey was the first of Jane Austens novels to be finished for
publication, despite the fact that up to that time she had made a start on Sense and
Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, it was first published in 1818, posthumously.
1.6.2 Story
Northanger Abbey is a delightfully entertaining coming-of-age story, often referred to as
Jane Austens Gothic parody. Old castles, locked rooms, mysterious chests, enigmatic
notes, and dictatorial fathers give the story eccentricity but one with a decidedly satirical
twist. The novel is the story of the remarkably innocent, gothic novel-obsessed 17-yearold Catherine Morland, an impressionable girl, who "read all such works as heroines
must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so
soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives". Leaving her home for the
sophisticated world of Bath, she falls in love with Henry Tilney, only for a multitude of
romantic embarrassing situations to occur, mostly when she visits his home of
Northanger Abbey where, far from her imaginings "the breeze had not seemed to waft
the sighs of the murdered to her; it had wafted nothing worse than a thick mizzling rain",
and where she goes on to suppose Henry's father to have murdered his mother.

25

Coote, Stephen, The Penguin Short History of English Literature, Penguin Books, London, 1993, p. 375

17

Austen divides the novel in two parts where she also includes a parody of a popular
Gothic novel by Anne Radcliffe. Book I begins when seventeen-year-old, Catherine
Morland is invited by her wealthier neighbours in Fullerton, the Allens, to accompany
them to visit the town of Bath, a resort for the wealthier members of British society. Here
Catherine is introduced to Henry Tilney, a young clergyman who electrifies Catherine
with his wit and pleasant chat and who, much to her disappointment, Catherine does not
see again for some time. Mrs. Allen meets an old schoolfriend, Mrs. Thorpe, and her
three young daughters, including Isabella, who is a little older than Catherine and
becomes her best friend. Shallow, vivacious, flirtatious and fond of gossip, Isabella
initiates Catherine into the social world of Bath, with all its balls, dances, shows, fashion,
and its gossip. The tow friends are met with the arrival of James Morland, Catherine's
brother, and John Thorpe, Isabella's brother who are friends at Oxford University. Soon
James and Isabella are in love. Although John tries to pursue Catherine, asking her to be
his dance partner she is not interested in hi and at a ball, Catherine sees Henry Tilney
again She decides to become friends with Eleanor Tilney who is a sweet, elegant, and
respectable young lady and Henry's sister. They discuss novels, and Catherine is
delighted to find that Henry and Eleanor love books as much as she does.
Book II begins with the arrival of Henry's older brother, Captain Frederick Tilney.
Dismayed by the discovery of James's modest income, Isabella, begins to flirt with
Frederick. Innocent Catherine cannot understand her friend's behavior, but Henry
understands all too well, as he knows his brother's character and habits. The flirtation
continues even when James returns, much to his distress.
Eleanor invites Catherine to visit the Tilney home in Northanger Abbey. Catherine who,
in accordance with her novel reading, expects the abbey to be exotic and frightening, is
delighted at the prospect of visiting a real abbey and at seeing more of Henry. Before she
leaves, Isabella tells her that John is planning to propose to her. Catherine tells Isabella to
write him and tell him, with her apologies, that he is mistaken. Meanwhile, Frederick
appears and flirts with Isabella, who returns his attentions. Dismayed by this behavior,
Catherine asks Henry to convince Frederick to leave Isabella alone but he refuses,

18

knowing that Isabella is at least as guilty as the captain. He tells Catherine that Frederick
will probably leave Bath with his regiment soon anyway.
1.6.3 Literary Commentary
Catherine's character grows throughout the novel, as she gradually becomes a real
heroine, learning from her mistakes when she is exposed to the outside world in Bath.
She sometimes makes the mistake of applying Gothic novels to real life situations.
Because of her overactive imagination, Catherine considers all sorts of terrifying schemes
about the place, each of which is thwarted. For instance, a strange bureau in Catherine's
room turns out to contain nothing more mysterious than receipts. Besides, she begins to
suspect General Tilney, a tyrannical old snob, of having murdered his deceased wife.
When Catherine visits Henry's house at Woodston, the General suggests her to marry
Henry and she gets another letter, this time from Isabella, telling her that Frederick has
left her, and asking Catherine to make an apology to James for her. Catherine wishes she
had never known Isabella. The General leaves on a business trip, and Henry goes back to
Woodston for several days. The General then returns without prior notice and tells
Eleanor to send Catherine away the next morning. Though she is very embarrassed,
Eleanor has no choice but to send Catherine to her home in Fullerton. Catherine's family
is annoyed by the General's discourtesy, but is glad to have her home. Suddenly Henry
arrives in Fullerton and proposes to her. He explains that his father's behavior was due to
John Thorpe. They choose to wait until the General gives his permission to their
marriage. Within a few months, Eleanor marries a very wealthy and important man,
which puts the General in a good mood. Once he is told of the true nature of the
Morland's financial situation, which is moderate, he gives his consent, and the novel ends
with the marriage of Henry and Catherine. Eventually, General Tilney acquiesces,
because Eleanor has become engaged to a wealthy and titled man; and he discovers that
the Morlands are far from destitute.
In Northanger Abbey Jane Austen is still following that eighteenth-century tradition, by
addressing the reader more often, and more directly, than she will do in later books; she

19

Events are presented to us from the authors viewpoint because she needs, at this point, to
take a detached stance from her heroine so that she can poke gentle fun at her. We can be
appreciative of such charming examples in Northanger Abbey as: A persuasion of her
partiality for him had been the only cause of [his] giving her a serious thought. It is a
new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroines
dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be
all my own.26
The plot of Northanger Abbey is much less complex than any of the three later novels.
There is a simple chain of events: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. Sub-plots
are kept to a minimum. The storyline is much more straightforward here than it ever
would be again; evidently so because, since it was intended for a pastiche, complexities
of plot were not required; all the author wanted was a simple narrative, to decorate with
her pieces of Gothic absurdity.
Unity of time and place were always a strict regulation with Jane Austen. Her novels
hardly ever spread, in their time-scheme, over more than a few months. She seldom
allows herself more than two, at most three, shifts of location. Thus, Northanger Abbey
starts in Bath, after a hurried outline of the heroines origins, moves to Northanger, and
then home to Wiltshire.
We notice that there are fewer sharp observations on social behaviour in Northanger
Abbey than there are in the later novels There is less of the coldblooded depiction that we
see in the portrayal of characters such as Mrs. Elton, the awful brother and sister-in-law
in Sense and Sensibility, Bingleys sisters in Pride and Prejudice, or Dr. Grant in
Mansfield Park.
Its interesting to observe that Austen handles the hero-heroine relationship in
Northanger Abbey as deftly, as movingly, as competently, as any of those in the other five
novels. Henry Tilney, who is, without a doubt, one of her nicest heroes talks to the
heroine quite a bit more than any of the other male leads do. There is room in Northanger
26

Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, Penguin Books, London, 1972, p. 108

20

Abbey for Catherine and Henry to have conversations, maybe because of the lack of subplot.
I believe that Catherine does not have the wit of Elizabeth Bennet or the experience and
unselfishness of Anne Elliot, but she rapidly learns that Gothic novels are really just
fiction and do not correspond with reality. She soon learns that they are really just fiction
and do not always correspond with reality. We all love her for her wit, humour and
innocence, for her ability to learn, and why not, for her cheerful company. On a desert
island I would like to choose her over domineering Emma, for example because, as the
author says herself: Mr. and Mrs. Allen were sorry to lose their young friend, whose
good humour and cheerfulness made her a valuable companion.27
Considered by many critics to be the stepping stone of Jane Austens career and style as a
writer, Northanger Abbey demonstrates why Jane Austen has started a
revolution when it comes to the literature of her time and the social context of her life.
What most delights modern literature academic in this book is not the story
itself, of a young woman named Catherine Morland, but its recursive irony and
playful rebellion against time-honored rules and genres but also the
strength and independence of the main characters.
Both Austen and Catherine portray Catherine's life in gallant termsAusten humorously,
and Catherine sincerely, particularly when she suspects General Tilney of murdering his
wife. Because Austen couches her portrayal of Catherine in irony, Catherine is
realistically described as lacking in experience and perception, unlike the heroines of
Gothic and romance novels.
Catherine fails to see the apparent mounting affiliation between her brother James and her
friend Isabella. Also, she fails to admit Isabella's true nature until long after it has hurt her
brother. Moreover, she unintentionally leads John Thorpe into thinking that she loves
him, and most significantly, she humiliates herself in front of Henry Tilney when he finds
out she suspects his father of murder. It seems to us that Catherine is an avid reader of
27

Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, Penguin Books, London, 1972, p. 57

21

novels but she is inexperienced at reading people, and this is what causes many of the
problems she encounters. By the end of the novel, she has become a much better judge of
character, having learned from her mistakes with Isabella and General Tilney. She is also,
perhaps, a bit more cynical about people, as Henry is. Ultimately, it is her integrity and
caring nature that win Henry's heart and bring her happiness.
Catherines inexperience and transparence is a deliberate method on the part of the
author. She is both a parodic character and a medium for the reader who is also uncertain,
wide-eyed, into this strange and indisputably shallow world. It seems that people are
obsessed with clothing, fashions and second-hand remarks. Nevertheless, the reader is
also allowed distance by the authorial voice. For example Catherine allows herself to be
whipped into a kind of grotesque fancy by Henry Tilneys comparisons of Northanger
Abey to the settings of Gothic novels. She then spends a sleepless night wondering what
could possibly be in the locked drawer of the cabinet! The readers know it will be
something ordinary, but they still cant help but wonder. There are intellectual
engagements and layers of meaning and humour in this novel which are indeed
remarkable.
Northanger Abbey is a love story. Catherine and Henry Tilney have a cut and thrust
relationship all through the book. But it is also an early piece of meta-fiction: the lovers
discuss and debate the merits of fiction versus nonfiction and true life, and have an
exchange about womens writing which ingeniously overturns an idea.
This book is also political, in the sense that it introduces feminism in the British literature
by revealing Austens reactions to the problem of equality between men and women - she
disagrees with this in some ways, in her work, but she is both within and ahead of her
time. We remember a relevant episode here, when Catherine tells Tilney that she does not
keep a journal and he thinks she must be lying. He says: How are your various dresses to
be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion, and curl of your hair to be
described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal?My dear
madam, I am not so ignorant of young ladies ways as you wish to believe me; it is this
delightful habit of journalising which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing

22

for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Every body allows that the talent of writing
agreeable letters is peculiarly female He goes on a little. Catherine baulks. She says: I
have sometimes thought whether ladies do write so much better letters than gentlemen!
That isI should not think the superiority was always on our side.28
But it is still this man sometimes so annoying and bullying - that Catherine begins to
fall in love with. Henry defies convention, worldly ambition and his father's anger to
marry Catherine. In this perspective he is indeed, an enjoyably romantic hero. His sense
of duty towards his parish is solid because he makes a point of being in residence for "the
parish meeting" and for the Sunday services. These touches of attention to duty seem to
point forward to the Henry who can come to an "open and bold" breach with his father
for Catherine's sake, can part from him in "dreadful disagreement" and can act with
"reason ... conscience ... justice ... honour ... fidelity". There is something about Henry
Tilney that has something to do with the beliefs he quietly professes. Finally, in the scene
where he opens Catherine's ideas to "the extravagances of her late fancies", and in her
reflections following it, Henry speaks with wisdom and tender patience clearly and
simply and without embarrassment about his religious faith: Dear Miss Morland, consider
the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging
from? "Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are
English, that we are Christians ... Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been
admitting?" 29
She enjoys a little intellectual infighting and will grow to enjoy it more while the reader
would side with her in these debates. Maybe she is more imaginative than suggestible,
though the extent of what she imagines potential does lead to her putting her foot in her
mouth at one point.
Another important theme in Northanger Abbey is the ever presence of
acquisitiveness and materialism as a main trait of the people surrounding Catherine.
Prosperity and wealth as well as the pursuit of respectability is one of the most common
themes in all of Austens six novels. In her later writing, the author would start linking the
28
29

idem, p. 81
idem, p.161

23

protagonists personalities with the objects of their love in an attempt to give the reader
the ability to create a better representation of the person in question.
Jane Austens sound and lively sense, her Greek feeling for balance and proportion, are
not less clear in Northanger Abbey than in the other novels. None of the others, moreover,
gives so clear an impression of the authors enjoyment in writing her story. The scenes of
amusement at Bath, the vulgarity and insincerity of Isabella Thorpe, the broader comedy
of her brother, the ironic talk of Henry Tilney, all are executed with high-spirited gusto;
and we may believe that Jane Austen loved the simple-minded, warm-hearted girl, whom
she tenderly steers between the rocks into harbour.30
Austen's world is our world though, appearances have changed. She is so funny about it,
and her encompassing irony is her most essential invention of all. It's a matter not just of
shrewd social observation but also of something brand-new: the ability to stand apart
from life even as it's being lived. Hers is a quicksilver narrative technique that puts us
almost inside a character's head and heart and then immediately darts away to someplace
else. Of herself, Austen reveals nothing directly; she's everywhere and nowhere. She
remains the innovative master of what at the present we call ''cool.''

Chapter 2: Ian McEwen and the Art of Unease

Motto: Fiction is a random, associative business, just the white noise of daydreaming thought.'' 31
30

Child, Harold, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (190721) ,
Volume X Jane Austen, 3. Northanger Abbey, http://www.bartleby.com/222/1003.html
31
Gussow, Mel, A Cool Writer Warms Up; Ian Mc Ewans Latest Novel Charts an emotional Journey, The
New York Times, April, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/23/books/a-cool-writer-warms-up-ian-

24

2.1 Englands national author

McEwan is one of those rare writers whose works have obtained both popular approval
and critical acclaim. His novels are on the bestseller lists. They deal with issues that are
essential in our times: politics, and the endorsement of vested interests; male violence and
the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology;
love and purity; and the pursuit for an ethical worldview. He is well regarded by critics,
both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the meaning and capacities of narrative
fiction. His readers are called upon to be there, not just to the impressive themes, but also
to the precision of his writing.
Born on 21 June, McEwan was David McEwan and Rose Lillian Violets son. Though his
original birthplace was in Aldershot, Hampshire, England he spent much of his childhood
in East Asia, Germany and North Africa. His father was moving his job as an army
officer. He and his family returned to England at the age of twelve, where he resumed his
education at Woolverstone Hall School. In 1970 he received his degree in English
literature from the University of Sussex and he became one of the first graduates of
Malcolm Bradburys creative writing course, at the University of East Anglia.
His exceptional talent, the unique nature of his works as well as the fact that his writings
were transformed into plays and screen adaptations brought him fame and popularity. His
talent began to be recognized nationally and beyond. He won numerous awards, and
because of the manner in which he approached his own writing as well as the architecture
of his stories he gained the nickname: Ian Macabre.
McEwans writing varies from morbid stories, such as First Love, Last Rights (1975), to
novels like Enduring Love (1997) and 2001s Atonement (made into an Oscar-winning
film). He has been designated six times for the Man Booker prize (winning once, for
mcewan-s-latest-novel-charts-an-emotional-journey.html

25

Amsterdam, in 1998) and A New Yorker profile in 2009 called him Englands national
author. 32
Ian McEwan has demonstrated an outstanding interest in the problem of evil since he was
very young as a writer. He is not alert and interested in the anthropology of evil but is
first and foremost attracted to the epistemology of immorality and the presentation how
this is reflected upon the lives of his protagonists. The structure of his novels stands on
the process of initiation which his immature and untested characters have to experience.
This initiation brings them maturity. His most admired novels: The Cement Garden, The
Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, The Daydreamer,
Enduring Love, Amsterdam, and Atonement let us see that love turns out to be the only
force which can bring atonement and rebirth.
Early in his livelihood, McEwan gained access to elements of his unconscious through
free-association, active imagination, meditation and the use of recreational drugs. These
elements include strong feelings associated with the Oedipus complex, difficulties with
masculine self-identification, feelings of negative response, unsettled unhappiness,
wishes to go back to childhood, and distorted sexuality. McEwan dealt with these themes
by creating characters who conveyed them through sexual deviations and cruelty or acted
them through to their logical conclusion. Consequently, he was able to brazen out
formerly repressed aspects of his personal life and resolve some of his emotional
problems in safety, whereas availing himself of rich substance for his creative writing.
If Ian McEwan's early work is more concerned with family life and its twisting, there is a
crystal-clear politicization after The Comfort of Strangers (1981); his later work is
commendable for the multifarious relationship between art and politics in British
literature. All his later novels have strong political undercurrents most drastically
visualized in The Innocent (1990): Otto's mutilated dead body as a likeness to Berlin. In
Saturday (2005), the mass rally against the Iraq War in 2003 is the setting against which
the Perowne's Bloomsday takes place. Similarly, in Black Dogs (1992) or Amsterdam
32

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_fact_zalewski

26

(1998) politics are shown in their complex relationship to art which is also observed in
The Atonement (2001).
Many of McEwans novels revolve around life being transformed by a sudden event or a
plot twist that prompts a rethink of the novel. His books often have political themes
from terrorism to climate change. He is drawn to how power is dispensed and what
people do with it, how dreams are built up and then collapse. His novels also appear on
the school curriculum.
2.2 I'm an atheist
Like Jane Austen, McEwan prides himself on his good manners, but he turns his nose up
at religion. As an atheist, he says that religion is a "morally neutral force," and acts of
extraordinary cruelty are best understood for their human, rather than religious,
dimensions. The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE producer Helen
Whitney in April 2002: I don't believe in God. I certainly don't, therefore, believe in
some sort of supernatural or trans-historical force that somehow organizes life on dark or
black principles. I think there are only people behaving, and sometimes behaving
monstrously. Sometimes their monstrous behavior is so beyond our abilities to explain it,
we have to reach for this numinous notion of evil. But I think it's often better to try and
understand it in real terms, in ... either political or psychological terms.
There's something at the same time, very, very attractive about this word. ... It's a great
intensifier. It just lets us say that we thoroughly abhor this behavior. But it's quite clear, as
a species ... in our nature, we are capable of acts of extraordinary love and kindness,
inventiveness and mutual aid.
On the other side, we are capable of acts of extraordinary destruction. I think it's inherent.
I think one of the great tasks of art is really to explore that. ... I personally think the novel,
above all forms in literature, is able to investigate human nature and try and understand
those two sides, all those many, many sides of human nature. But I'm a little suspicious of
the way we want to throw up our hands and just say, "Well, it's evil."

27

It's us. You know? And any reflection on, for example, the Holocaust, probably our
greatest, lowest moment in modern history, has to finally reflect on what it is we seem to
be able to be capable of, especially once we have the power of technology to kill on a
vast scale. ... I don't know, quite honestly, whether the world suffers from people not
believing enough in things, or believing too much in things.
In fact, as I get older, I begin to feel that actually what we need more in the world is
doubt; more skepticism, less crazed certainty. I feel that religious zeal, political zeal, is a
highly destructive force. People who know the answer and are going to impose it on
everybody else, I think, are terrifying people. What I would like is skepticism and doubt
amongst political leaders. I want it in people who express love and belief in their gods.
There are many, many gods and many, many religions. It's that sort of certainty that "My
God is the one true God and all the others are just pagan fantasies." I find those kinds of
assertions terrifying. ...33
Some other time Ian McEwans declares again: I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a
moment that our moral sense comes from a God. It's human, universal, [it's] being
able to think our way into the minds of others.34
In an essay on apocalyptic beliefs, he writes, It is not for nothing that one of the
symptoms in a developing psychosis, noted and described by psychiatrists, is religiosity.
On another occasion, McEwan, speaking of 9/11, writes Faith is at best morally neutral,
and at worst a vile mental distortion. Our habits are to respect people of faith, but I think
weve been forced to question those habits. The powers of sweet reason look a lot more
attractive post-9/11 than the beckonings of faith, and I no longer put them on equal
scales.35
No wonder that McEwan's books are savvy, intriguing and deeply creepy. With
McEwan, things are perfectly normal all around an event that seeps into perversion or
33

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/mcewan.html
"Faith and Doubt At Ground Zero," Frontline, February, 2002, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ian_McEwan
35
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_fact_zalewski#ixzz2HCEZnsaV
34

28

killing or a twist that somehow does not quite cease to be ordinary. The creepiness comes
on slowly, like going around all day only to discover you've got your cloths on inside out,
or have forgotten your underpants. McEwan's books flip the normal inside out. Or as he
says of Briony's eventual novels, "Her fiction was known for its amorality." 36
In Atonement, McEwan also echoes Friedrich Nietzsches argument in On the Genealogy
of Morals. We locate here the idea that the Christian ideas of sin and forgiveness are molded on the
psychological interaction between creditor and debtor. Sin is not just an offense against
God but it is a debt. Under the old law of Moses sin must be repaid. The best paraphrase
of the Lords Prayer, which beseeches God to forgive us our debts, captures neatly this
economics of guilt.
In McEwans novels the message could be that the problem for humanity is: what can it
possibly do to pay God back for the sin of the Fall? Or, in the case of Atonement, what
can Briony possibly do to rectify the effects of her false testimony? Nietzsche writes:
Indebtedness towards God: this thought becomes for him [the guilty person]an
instrument of torture.[] This is represents a kind of madness of the will in
psychic cruelty which simply knows no equal: the will of man to find himself guilty and
reprehensible to a point beyond the possibility of atonement. Brionys desire to make up
for her misdeed is thus representative of a broader economy of guilt that, for Nietzsche,
characterizes the psychology of modern humanity. The root of this madness, as
Nietzsche indicates, is inscribed in the complex structure of modernity.
2.3 Atonement Critical Acclaim
Atonement was published in 2001 and has sold more than four million copies since it was
published.37 It is widely regarded as one of McEwan's best works, was shortlisted for the
36

Stefan-Cole, J., Atonement, Ian McEwan, a Non Review,

http://www.freewilliamsburg.com/september_2002/atonement.html
37

Zalewski, Daniel, The Background Hum- Ian McEwans Art of Unease, February 23, 2009,
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_fact_zalewski

29

Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Novel Award and winner of the W. H. Smith
Literary Award, National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times
Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). TIME
magazine named Atonement in its list All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels. It was adapted for
the screen, and the film released in 2007 the book was adapted into a BAFTA and
Academy Award nominated film of the same title, starring James McAvoy and Keira
Knightley, and directed by Joe Wright.
2.4 Atonement Time and Place
The opening of Ian McEwan's Atonement, Doubleday, 2002, feels like a 19th century
English parlor novel. This is a story that begins with three young people in the garden of
a country house on the hottest day of 1935, and ends with three profoundly changed lives.
It is a depiction of love and war, class, childhood and England, that explores shame and
forgiveness, atonement and the possibility of absolution. It ranges from an upper class
household in pre-War southern England to the retreat of the British army to Dunkirk and
to a wartime London hospital, ending with a coda in 1999.
It begins like a novel by Jane Austen, as an English country house comes alive in 1935
with a diverse cast of privileged characters, most of whom belong to the extended Tallis
family. Their Estate is located in the Surrey Hills in England. Then there is a swift
cinematic cut to the battle of Dunkirk in World War II, and in the third part the scene is a
hospital on the home front in London. Finally, in the coda, the section that so moved the
author's wife, the book moves forward to 1999 for its embracing, reflective conclusion.
It is at The Tallis Estate that the key moments of the exposition of the story take place.
The first part of the book completely takes place on this estate. In the final scene it has
become a hotel; the family reunion for Briony's 77th birthday, with more than fifty guests
including various grandchildren and great-grandchildren, takes place in the same library
where Robbie and Cecilia consummated their love for the first and only time.
2.5 Atonement Story

30

The first part of the novel begins in 1935 and tells the story of Briony Tallis, a 13-yearold, who irrevocably changes the course of several lives. Her older sister Cecilia attends
University of Cambridge with Robbie Turner, Cecilia's childhood friend. Briony views a
moment of sexual tension between them from afar and she misconstrues the situation
assuming that Robbie is acting violently toward Cecilia. He, meanwhile, writes several
sketches of a love letter which he asks Briony to deliver to Cecilia. But he gives her a
version he had meant to throw away - with coarse and vulgar references. Reading this
version Briony is so disappointed in Robbie's intentions that she gets distressed and very
sad. Moreover, she soon walks in the library where Robbie and Cecilia were making love.
Thus she misconstrues the sexual act as rape and believes that Robbie is a "maniac".
At a family dinner party graced with the presence of Briony's brother, Leon and his
friend, Paul Marshall, we find out that Briony's maternal cousins, twins Jackson and
Pierrot and Lola have run away and the dinner party breaks into teams to look for them.
In the night, Briony discerns her cousin Lola, apparently being raped by an attacker she
cannot unmistakably make out. Lola is not capable or is disinclined to recognize the
aggressor, but Briony comes to the decision to lay blame on Robbie whom she accuses to
the police as the rapist, declaring she has seen him in the dark. He is taken away to
penitentiary, with only Cecilia and his mother believing in his innocence.
When World War II starts, Robbie has already spent a couple of years in prison. He is
released only to enlist in the army to fight in war. Cecilia has become a nurse and she has
cut off all contact with her family. She has only been in contact with Robbie by letter and
they meet once for half an hour during Cecilia's lunch break when their meeting starts
uneasily. However, they share a kiss before leaving each other.
The war is going badly in France and the army is withdrawing to Dunkirk. The wounded
Robbie goes to the refuge and there he thinks about Cecilia and past occurrences like
teaching Briony how to swim. He also reflects on the latter's probable reasons for
accusing him. His only meeting with Cecilia is the remembrance that keeps him walking,

31

his only endeavor is seeing her again. At the end of part two, Robbie falls asleep in
Dunkirk, one day before the evacuation.
In part three of the novel, Briony feels sorry. She has realized her fault, and comes to the
decision that it was Paul Marshall, Leon's buddy, whom she saw raping Lola. She rejects
her place at Cambridge and becomes a trainee nurse in London. She still writes, even if
she does not chase it with the same unruliness as she did as a child.
As a nurse Briony is called to the bedside of a lethally injured French soldier and she
soothes him in his last moments while he mistakes her for an English girl whom his
mother wanted him to get married to. Before his death, he asks her :"Do you love me?",
to which Brionys answer "Yes" did not come out just because "no other answer was
possible". "For the moment, she did. He was a lovely boy far away from his family and
about to die." And Briony daydreams about the life she might have had if she had married
him.
After this episode, Briony attends her cousin Lola and Paul Marshalls wedding. Robbie
is on leave from the army and surprisingly, Briony meets him at her sister's. They both
refuse to forgive and forget her, who on the other hand, tells them she will try and put
things right. She pledges to begin the legal procedures needed to absolve Robbie, albeit
Paul Marshall will never be held guilty for his crime because of his matrimony to Lola,
the victim.
The fourth section of the novel, entitled "London 1999", is written from Briony's
perspective who is now a famous 77 year-old novelist. She is dying of vascular dementia.
We find out that she is actually the author of the previous parts of the narrative.
We also discover that Cecilia and Robbie are indeed reunited in Briony's novel but in
reality they were not. We assume that Robbie died of septicaemia, caused by his wound,
on the coastline of Dunkirk and Cecilia is suggested to have been slaughtered by the
bomb that destroyed the gas and water mains above Balham Underground station. They
may have never met again.

32

Briony makes clear why she reconciles with changing real events and tries to bring
Cecilia and Robbie together in her narrative. She wants to give them gratification, at least
in an imaginary world, since in reality, because of her, they could not have their happy
time together, so much longed for. Briony would like to give it to them at least in her
novel. Thus, at the end of the book, she adds a final chapter in which they would be
present at her seventy-seventh birthday ceremony"still alive, still in love". Their
company points out that eventually they had forgiven her.
A twist comes at the last moment. We are left with Briony the novelist, "I know there's
always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really
happened?...The problem...has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when,
with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?" What really happened,
indeed. McEwan leaves us wondering about more than just Briony's authorial voice. This
potent tale ends with a typically McEwan uneasiness.38
We can observe how the novel's intrigues centre on perspective. Its main three parts are
told in the third person, we are required to rely on characters' readings of events. Indeed
the central interpretations occur to the reader but there are hardly any anchors that enable
the definite meanings of scenes and actions. The whole narrative, even Robbie's war
experience, appears to be Briony's version of possibilities and probabilities, whose
position and role as fact and fiction is at all times under question. The novel itself may be
one of Briony's versions of the story she sent to Horizon; it materializes as Briony's act of
atonement together with her more unswerving efforts to clear Robbie's name.
2.6 Major Themes in Atonement
The authors wish to write this novel came out of his awareness of the moral hysteria
that swept through the United States - and then Britain - about child abuse and the
recovered memory movement. I was struck reading about cases of perfectly innocent men
and women who had been sent to jail for unbelievable sentences on the evidence of a
child manipulated by social workers, judges, police and parents in a collusion of panic.
38

Stefan-Cole, J., Atonement, Ian McEwan, a Non Review,

http://www.freewilliamsburg.com/september_2002/atonement.html

33

For a long time I'd been considering a plot in which an innocent person is condemned by
a child. The heroine of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is a girl completely obsessed by
the Gothic novels she's been reading. She sees the world in their terms and makes a
whole set of rather amusing, ludicrous and shaming assumptions that turn out to be
baseless. I wanted to elaborate on that and look at storytelling in relation to the
imagination and to fiction.39 The shaping of texts meaning from other texts, called
intertextuality by critics40 seems to be present in Atonement to foreground Brionys
critical lie.
Guilt, forgiveness, prejudice, loyalty, forgiveness, love and the resilience of the human
spirit, compensation and punishment are the themes of this attention-grabbing and so well
written a book. The plot of the novel centers on a woman who grows up and devotes her
whole life repenting a crime she committed while still a very young girl. I'm always
defending Briony. None of us would want to be judged by how we were at the age of 13.
The important thing about her is that the novel is about the growth of a moral conscience.
Initially, she sticks to her story, even though she has her doubts, but by the time she's in
her teens, she's beginning to feel real anguish. The beginning of her atonement is her
decision not to go to Cambridge and to follow her older sister into nursing instead. When
she receives Cyril Connolly's letter criticising her story it's another important staging post
in her moral growth. When he says, 'What you need is the backbone of a narrative,' she
realises that what she actually needs is backbone herself, and what she needs to do is
write about her own role in relation to the lovers at the fountain. So that's the beginning
of a lifetime of remorse for her.41
The question we have in mind is if Briony can be the only person who should feel
responsible. Is there anyone else at fault for the crime committed on that hot summer
night in 1935? Can we see Lola's guilt for not saying anything? And Paul Marshall, is he
not guilty for standing silent while an innocent man goes to prison? The novel she has
written about it cannot absolve her because she's playing God, setting the terms and rules
39

Interview with Ian McEwan, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-131389/Ian-McEwan-QA.html

40
http://readingatonement.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/atonements-intertextuality-part-2/
41
idem

34

- and no one can absolve God. But I'd rather a world peopled by the likes of Briony than
by Paul Marshall.42
It seems to us that many are guilty among the adults of the novel. It seems to us that that
so many people are capable of understanding more than a thirteen-year-old girl, but not
one can do anything to make things right. All of them rely completely on Brionys false
testimony. We wonder: should more not have been done in the investigation of the crime?
We see that the question is left open even at the end of the book. We do not know in
conclusion if Briony achieves her atonement by writing her story and keeping her lovers
and allowing their love to survive. We can only assume so. She says, 'The attempt is all'.
Comparing her moral life to that of Paul and Lola, she at least has remorse, guilt and
conscience.43
Besides the felony she committed as a young girl, Briony also feels culpable of her
authority as a writer: she has the freedom of writing whatever story she may choose. If
she was able to send Robbie to prison, she might as well make him continue to exist after
the war. The confidence readers put in Briony to put in the picture for them "what really
happened" leaves her feeling blameworthy about her life's work.
The theme of social inequities and injustices also appear throughout the novel: for
example, the relationship between Robbie Turner, son of the Tallis charwoman, and
Cecilia Tallis, daughter of the ministry-employed and well-to-do Jack Tallis.another one
is that of Briony herself who thinks her sister is in serious jeopardy of falling underneath
her class and she sets out to save her from harm. She places social distinction above love
and her denunciation of Robbie proves this snobbery to hold up in the courts.
The theme of misunderstanding is also present in Atonement to a great extent. What
happens in this novel is all created by the mind's eye to misperceive observation.
Brionys, transient positioning in her psychological growth, along with the conditions she
42
43

idem
idem

35

happens to observe - the fountain scene, the letter, the library scene, and the rape - all
make possible a embezzlement of her emotions. She is still a child and her obsession with
order, her fantasizing about playwriting and fencing, the sincerity and earnestness with
which she takes her play all stand for her at a point where she is too young to see the
world beyond her own reality. This error maybe, is a part of the psychological maturing
process.
Much of the action takes place in a state where some senses are blocked or absent while
others are accessible. Briony can perceive the incident between Cecilia and Robbie at the
fountain, but she can't hear it. Briony reads the word in the letter, but she does not make it
out. Briony observes the the sex in the library, but nobody says anything about it. And
finally, she perceives the sounds while Lola is being raped, but can't completely
distinguish what or who it is because it is dark. Part One is all about perception and
misperception. Objects only serve as agents to this theme - windows, doorways, light,
darkness, etc.
The author is able to narrate the same episode through different eyes so the reader can get
the whole picture. Briony (as author) tries her best to make up for what she did not
understand as a child. She wants to present the story from every single angle, and not just
the writer's point of view. In achieving this, Briony hopes to atone for her misconception
of events as a young girl.
Another theme of this novel is the themes of identity, so common in coming-of-age
novels. We discover Briony at distinctive points in her life which complicates this
investigation into what makes up one's own sense of individuality and how confident that
person has become with that outpouring image. The uncertainty of identity indicates the
confusion of coming into oneself at the golden age of lost purity as well as what a nation
is during war. We must actually ask and answer: who wrote the book - Briony Tallis or
Ian McEwan?
The theme of war needs to be addressed in Atonement as a separate component to the
overall themes of the book. McEwan is an activist against war. Besides,his father was a

36

Major in the British Armed Forces and so he grew up in different areas of the world while
his father was serving his duties.
In Atonement Robbie Turner must fight in the war to vindicate himself from a crime he
did not commit a fact that emphasizes the injustices of any war. The story is a fictional
one, but the scenes that involve the war, both in France in Part Two and in the hospitals in
London in Part Three, are historically precise. Particularly the horrors that the British
Army faced as they awaited mass departure on the beaches of Dunkirk and the German
planes continued their attack, is captured in astonishing detail in this novel. In addition,
the writer himself acknowledges a book he read in 1977 called No Time For Romance,
written by Lucilla Andrews that was the personal account of a nurse who served in the
hospitals in London during the war - Briony's occurrences in Part Three are directly
inspired from that comprehension.
2.7 A Study in Cognitive Psychology
As we can see, the main character in Atonement is part narrator, part character and her
transformation from child to woman brings Briony to the point of realizing her
wrongdoing as a child and therefore she takes the decision of writing the novel to find
expiation. The structure of this novel stands on the process of budding and maturing of an
inexperienced heroine. This initiation brings her maturity. We might even say that this is a
bildungsroman.
Brionys story is therefore complex in its ethical implications, for while the revelation of
her secret accuses her, the mystery of her motivations simultaneously excuses her yes,
she committed a crime, but her youthful navet meant that she acted without full
knowledge. Like Oedipus, she is both guilty and innocent because of this asymmetry in
the structure of knowledge.44 This is knowledge which can go so far as to accept horror
in order to know it. It reveals the discrete connivance which maintains it in a relation with
the most insupportable form of power.
44

Mathews, Peter, The Impression of a Deeper Darkness: IanMcEwans Atonement,

http://www.academia.edu/192075/The_Impression_of_a_Deeper_Darkness_Ian_McEwans_Atonement

37

The conclusion of the novel is, on the one hand, a real contemplation on the nature of
atonement which means: compensation, penitence and expiation. On the other hand, it is
a profound reflection on authorship that Briony shows to have awoken. We see that
neither authorial imagination - the writing of fiction, nor desolate reality - the work as a
nurse, for example, can essentially atone for the sin she came to have as a thirteen year
old girl. We are suggested at the end that differing forms of fiction are lies both in reality
and in novels. We are suggested that while the first can be harsh and vicious, wearying
and irreversibly destructive, the latter might be a possibility to achieve happiness
-impossible in real life.
The novel is an original piece of writing trying to be a study in cognitive psychology,
as the author himself declared. It is a study in cognitive psychology because it looks
like a revision of how we learn to survive, how we learn to be alive, how we learn to lie
in order to live according to our perception of the reality and how we sometimes escape
from it through our imagination. The author is convinced that the best way to deceive
someone is first to deceive yourself, because youre more convincing when youre
sincere. But our question is why should we lie and deceive? And maybe the answer
comes out as we see Briony trapping herself as she marched into the labyrinth of her
own construction, and becoming a very duplicitous character. Her doubts could be
neutralized only by plunging in deeper. The only escape from this trap is the atonement,
since after crime, theres always punishment, and after punishment there must be a way to
get free. I think this has been psychologically tested in the course of history.
In Brionys case, by looking for reparation for her mistake and the grievance she has
started off, to which the title refers to, she gets very uneasy and anxious and tries hard to
make corrections of the irretrievable she has caused. We remember that we know nothing
in fact and our education doesnt really prepare us for atrocities. I think this is why Ian
McEwans writing style has often been referred to as the art of unease.

38

In my opinion, this book calls into question the alternative of achieving dignity and it
actually communicates the apprehensive circumstances and the complexities of
conscientiousness and agency. Critics have noted that his novel pivots on a single,
transformative event: Brionys accusation.
The author, however, yearns for being ambiguous, perhaps because ambiguity makes one
more interested in what a writer actually wants to say. The novel is a meditation on the
act of testimony, beginning with Brionys initial accusation and extending ever outwards as, over
the following years, she begins to rethink the reliability of her position as a witness. He
really succeeds in being unlike Jane Austen, so comprehensible and educative. As a
postmodernist writer he gets as complicated and ambiguous as the world we live in,
though he desires to elucidate some of its deceptions and hoaxes. He confesses: Im still
often asked, What really happened? () I dont tire of it, because I think that to ask
that question of me means I succeeded in something. () We cant retreat to the
nineteenth century. We now have a narrative self-awareness that we can never escape, but
we dont want to be crushed by that, either. Atonement was my attempt to discuss where
we stand.45
This novel is written with cold precision, of ethical distinction. It is a picture of
individual lives and actions during the World War II exploring the tension between the
personal worlds of human beings and the public sphere, showing their reciprocated
dependency, their apprehension of life, their love their play of power. It dissects social
and political matters that endorse individual lives. At the centre of the books
narrative is a secret, an obscured truth, which McEwan uses to lure the reader
into the story. Like Briony, the reader is pushed toward a moral judgment by this act of
concealment, even though the information necessary to make an ethically informed
decisionis withheld.46
45

Zalewski, Daniel, The Background Hum - Ian McEwans art of unease,

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_fact_zalewski#ixzz2HCGcmvUv
Dr Sean Matthews, Ian McEwan, 2002, http://literature.britishcouncil.org/ian-mcewan
46
Mathews, Peter, The Impression of a Deeper Darkness: IanMcEwans Atonement,
http://www.academia.edu/192075/The_Impression_of_a_Deeper_Darkness_Ian_McEwans_Atonement

39

Hugely acclaimed, this is writing on a new scale, recognisably McEwan in the wellwrought prose and fine articulation of character, the cool precision of moral nuance, the
adept and surprising effects of plot, but also a revelation in the new and powerful sense of
history, of the pattern of individual lives and actions within the sweep of great events in
this case, the 1939-45 War. The narrative voice itself is an astonishing achievement: we
read the words of an elderly novelist, in 1990, writing the perspective of her own younger
self in first 1935, then 1940. (.) Few British novelists have matched the seriousness and
sustained force of Atonement: it is the work of a unique imaginative voice demanding our
attention and respect.47
Atonement is said to possess intertextual references to a number of other literary works
including Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Henry James' The Golden Bowl, Jane
Austen's Northanger Abbey, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Shakespeare's The
Tempest, Macbeth, and Twelfth Night. It has a imaginary letter as well, by the literary
critic and editor Cyril Connolly, addressed to Briony Tallis.
Accusers insist that McEwan copied the nursing in London during the war section of the
novel from this wartime memoir published in London in 1977 by Lucilla, No Time for
Romance. It was alleged that McEwan plagiarized from this work while writing
Atonement. The writer admitted he got inspiration from it but he demonstrated his
innocence. Several famous authors also leapt to his defence, great names like John
Updike, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Keneally, Zadie Smith, and the
reclusive Thomas Pynchon. They have all proved that good literature is related to genuine
literature, you cannot really invent new ideas, they are universal. Thus, they have all
showed that Atonement is certainly McEwans finest and most complex novel, its twists,
its revelation, emphasize the novel's already explicit ambivalence about being a novel,
and makes the book a proper postmodern artifact, wearing its doubts on its sleeve, on the
outside, as the Pompidou does its escalators. But it is unnecessary, unless the slightly

47

40

self-defeating point is to signal that the author is himself finally incapable of resisting the
distortions of tidiness. It is unnecessary because the novel has already raised, powerfully
but murmuringly, the questions that this final revelation shouts out. And it is unnecessary
because the fineness of the book as a novel, as a distinguished and complex evocation of
English life before and during the war, burns away the theoretical, and implants in the
memory a living, flaming presence.48

Chapter 3: Austens Northanger Abbey and McEwan's Atonement

Motto: Imagine if Jane Austen began a novel with her characteristic attention to muted passions and social
foibles, only to plunge into a racy sex scene, a rumored kidnapping, and a harrowing depiction of military
life. Such are the pleasures of this wildly ambitious new novel.49

3.1 The Presence of the Epigraph

The existence of an epigraph at the beginning of Atonement, the eleventh book written by
McEwan, can make us speculate what lies before us in a piece of writing. Humorous,
allusive, ironic, aphoristic or downright, playful or commanding, all-powerful or casual,
48

Wood, James, The Trick of Truth, http://www.powells.com/review/2002_03_21.html

49

Barrette, Daniel, The World Just So. Ian McEwan's Fictional Act of Atonement,
http://www.yalereviewofbooks.com/archive/spring02/review15.shtml.htm

41

an epigraph proceeds somewhere between the author and the readers, taking a sideways
approach to the text. As its inestimable diversity of meanings suggests, an epigraph is
about more than just a literary decoration. For many people, an epigraph is like a hors
d'oeuvre or a cocktail snack to the great entre or reception of a story because they
clarify some really important aspects of its theme and can get us going in the right
direction.
"Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained.
What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live.
Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding,
your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you.
Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could
they be perpetrated without being known in a country like this, where social and literary
intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of
voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss
Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?" 50
This epigraph is a quotation from Northanger Abbey, where Catherine Morland is
reproached by Henry Tilney for imagining Gothic horrors in a well-protected English
surroundings. In a nice echo, the Tallis-home-turned-hotel is called Tilney's. All through,
historical layers of English fiction are invoked - and rewritten. Jane Austen's decorums
turn to black farce.
We may even understand by the presence of this epigraph that Ian McEwan visibly wants
to carry out that one of the most difficult literary tasks, the simultaneous creation of a
reality that satisfies as a reality while signaling itself as a fiction. The characters, for
instance, have obviously theatrical and outlandish names (Pierrot, Lola, Leon, Briony),
which are simply incompatible with verisimilitude.51
His preference for this epigraph encourages us to think about what Atonement owes to
Austen in particular as it contains references to and imitations of authors from the English
50
51

Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, Penguin Books, London, 1972, chapter 24, p.161
Wood, James, The Trick of Truth, http://www.powells.com/review/2002_03_21.html

42

literary tradition. In several interviews, the writer himself has mentioned his sources of
inspiration: Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austens Northanger Abbey, was a
girl so full of the delights of Gothic fiction that she causes havoc around her when she
imagines a perfectly innocent man to be capable of the most terrible things. For many,
many years Ive been thinking how I might devise a hero or heroine who could echo that
process in Catherine Morland, but then go a step further and look at, not the crime, but
the process of atonement, and do it in writing do it through storytelling, I should say.
() To Newsweek, McEwan characterizes his literary inspiration rather differently,
mentioning that he referred to Atonement in his notebooks as my Jane Austen novel
(). I did have a notion of a country house and of some discrepancies beneath the
civilized surface. These interviews point us to two deeper levels on which to think about
McEwans use of Austen, levels that remain as yet unexplored in criticism. He has gone
a step further than Austen, crucially, by making Briony a novelist who like Austen
herself began taking her writing seriously at a young age. What McEwan shows us of
Brionys youthful writing a rhyming, melodramatic playlet is not especially of
Austens own juvenilia Yet McEwans characterization of Briony as being precociously
concerned with language and the trappings of professionalism is certainly reminiscent of
Austen, as of the other child writers whose work has recently been illuminated by
Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster.52
We can all agree that we are given from the very beginning a Romantic novel quote of
Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. This sets the tone for a book that will be packed with
literary metaphors. The form of the novel itself walks us through four English historical
periods: Part One--Austen'esque Romanticism, Part Two--Historical Fiction War Story,
Part Three--Victorian or Modern Memoir and Part Four--Post Modern speculation and
theory. Relying heavily on shared narratives and perspectives, Atonement will leave his
reader questioning the ability to overcome guilt as well as the power of storytelling and
the literary tradition. It is a true description a private drama of loss of innocence or
betrayal, played out against a larger history of bad faith.

52

Wells, Juliette, Shades of Austen in Ian McEwans Atonement,

http://www.questia.com/library/1G1-199801402/shades-of-austen-in-ian-mcewan-s-atonement

43

In a nutshell, the novel's epigraph serves as both a warning and a guide to how we should
comprehend Atonement. Catherine Moorland, who is reprimanded by Henry Tilney in the
quoted extract for her immature response to events around her, is the victim of reading
Gothic romances of her day. She fails to make a distinction between the fictive and the
real. McEwen ironically has the Tallis country house renamed Tilney's Hotel as a cunning
mark of respect to this fictional precedent. Northanger Abbey is in McEwens opinion, a
narrative "about someone's wild imagination causing havoc to people around them." We
see that Tilney's observations in his conversation with Catherine ("what ideas have you
been admitting?") can be applied equally to Briony whose over-active imagination leads
her to tell the crucial lie.
Granted the whole tragic context of Atonement, the Austen epigraph enlarges itself in
terms of ironic effects. How come to the Tallieses (except for Cecilia) did not suspect the
dreadful natureof Brionys accusation? The whole matter of being English, of being
Christians, of living in a country that protects through education, the law, the press all
come to the foreground again. The difference, this time, is that the atocities have not only
been perpetrated on the private sphere (something already devastating) but multiplied
(think of the war) to a wider political dimension53
3.2 Similarities
By the Austen quotation in Atonement readers are suggested to discover parallels between
this novel and Austen's work, Northanger Abbey. I am going to present here
some of these parallels hoping to contribute to a better understanding
of the levels on which to think of McEwans use of Austen, levels that so far have
remained as yet unexplored in criticism.54
First, both novels have several themes in common: family relationship, love,
money, snobbery, confusion and misperception, class difference, naivete of a main
character, the role of fiction - or drawing reality from literature, its influence on the
53

Azeredo, Genilda, Words, Images and Inventions, The Power of Metafiction in Austen, McEwan and Joe
Wright, http://www.abrapui.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Artigo-ABRAPUI-34-Genilda.pdf
54
idem

44

human mind (how fiction contributes to a dynamic but over-wrought imagination),

spiritual and emotional maturation and coming of age. They also include a documentary
quality and a reflective engagement with the society and its values.
Like Jane Austen, Ian McEwan became a writer by being a reader. By reading a lot, both
authors understand that the human beings have an essential need for ethical orientation
which is of particular significance in our world, characterised by unforeseen events and
change. The central role of change in their writings makes us perceive that rather than
arguing for normative codes of behaviour or concepts of virtue, and high merit, they both
understand ethics in terms of the interactive encounters between people.
These books are about war. War looms over 1980s England in Atonement as it did in
Austen's own world, though the carnage in McEwan's novel is much more atrocious than
anything depicted by Austen. They both are full of gorgeous and disturbing sentences
which serve a tight plot, a vast array of settings, with great intensity, they deal with
family dissolution and several characters are so socially and economically diverse that
they can be compared to the major works of the Victorian era.
Second, both books are about allegations and wrong accusations. We notice the similarity
between Catherine Morland's incorrect conclusions and the misguided suspicions and
erroneous observations of Briony Tallis. Both are very young, inexpert in the human
nature, both like reading and are over-imaginative heroines, but the consequences of
Brionys apprehensiveness and qualms are far more disappointing than those that result
from Catherines hesitations.
Third, although he did not commit any crime, General Tilney whom Catherine points the
finger at as being able to have tortured and murdered his wife, turns out to be capable of
harshness and utter meanness, whereas the person Briony accuses of rape is without a
doubt innocent and he is erroneously jailed as a result of her finger pointing and her
unjust testimony.

45

Fourth, there is the same kind of action in the two novels. In Atonement the action takes
place at a country estate that is, in spite of the modernity of its construction, evocative of
Austen's novel. McEwan referred to Atonement as his Jane Austen novel saying: I didn't
have Northanger Abbey or even Mansfield Park specifically in mind, but I did have a
notion of a country house and of some discrepancies beneath the civilized surface".
Fifth, as I mentioned above, both heroines are very young, inexpert in the human nature,
both like reading and are over-imaginative. They both live in a fantasy world of their
own. Their confusions are often triggered by the relationships of the people around her,
almost all being adults. For them, there is no clear cut distinction between reality and the
imaginary world that fiction creates around them. As we are told in the epigraph of
Atonement, a Jane Austens quotation, they are not prepared, not educated to face reality they cannot confront with the dangers of life.
Both girls are confused, their judgement is not clear in the light of some events that stand
beyond their power of understanding. Catherine allows herself to be whipped into a sort
of grotesque fancy by Henry Tilneys comparisons of Northanger Abey to the settings of
Gothic novels. She then spends a sleepless night wondering what could possibly be in the
locked drawer of the cabinet! Catherine was a girl so full of the delights of Gothic fiction
that she causes havoc around her when she imagines an innocent man to be capable of the
most terrible things.
Like Catherine, Briony also gives an incorrect interpretation through the perspective of
her past lectures. She echoes her but goes a step further and looks at the process of
atonement, more than she looks at the crime itself, and does it in writing, through
storytelling. Both Catherine and more so Briony become aware of their crossings into
fantasy worlds and acknowledge their blunders in doing so. It shows growth and maturity
in their characters and makes them more likeable as heroines.
When Briony reads the faithful note from Robbie her interpretation does not involve only
misreading of what was happening but also a change of literary genre. She thinks: No
more princesses... and upon reading the explicit note she was sure that her sister was in
46

some way threatened and would need her help (McEwan 106-07). With that letter her
whole image of Robbie was inclining towards the villain of the story, so she convinces
herself that he is a maniac, as Lola calls him. Even more, after she stumbles on the two
lovers in the library, she thinks that her worst fears have come to life. As in any
bildungsroman, Briony grows up and becomes aware that she was wrong in claiming
that it was wrong to accuse Robbie of rape. When she realized the gravity of her actions it
was too late for a reconciliation.
Sixth, we can detect the similarity of how the authors of these two novels position
themselves in their relation with their heroines. We see that Catherine and Jane Austen on
the one hand, and Briony and McEwan on the other hand, are in some measure
indistinguishable. There are subtleties that call into attention that there is a distance
between the characters and their authors, a distance that articulates itself in a new
raggedness of form and in a self-conscious insistence on the novel's story-ness.
Thus, Austen and Catherine portray Catherine's life in heroic termsAusten humorously,
and Catherine seriously, especially when she suspects General Tilney of murdering his
wife. Because Austen couches her portrayal of Catherine in irony, Catherine is
realistically portrayed as deficient in experience and perception. Events are presented to
us from the authors viewpoint because she needs, at this point, to take a detached stance
from her heroine so that she can poke gentle fun at her. I believe that intending at the start
to take a detached view of their heroines, both Jane Austen and Ian Mc Ewan became
fonder and fonder of them as their stories progressed.
Seventh, Northanger Abbey and Atonement are both novels about the role of fiction in our
life and morality. Briony is in love with literature, much the same as Catherine. She also
takes everything the world throws at her and puts it through a literary perspective. Like
Catherine she also allows prose have deep effects on her life. In her case, however, things
are getting more into trouble. When it comes about Lolas rape, we know that as Briony
was passing by, she only would have wanted to see Robbie. It was too dark for such a
clear view but on the behalf of her winding up as a fiction writer and of the past events,
Briony declares that it had been him. This lie of hers in front of an officer of the law

47

would destroy two lives. By letting fiction determine fact for her, the consequences of her
lie would be tragic and irreversible.
Given the parallels McEwan has already implied between Briony and Austen as child
writers, its is poignant for us to envision Austen able to sit, as Briony does, among her
extended family at the age of seventy-seven, enjoying the tribute due her after a long,
successful career as a novelist and relishing as well the reminder of how much talent and
determination she possessed in her early teens.55 By creating a heroine evocative of and
yet different from Austen, the author of Atonement consent to our freedom to imagine
what Austen might have said, both in girlhood and prime of life, about her own youthful
compositions.
We can also perceive similarities between other characters not only between the main
heroines of the two novels. For example, there is a connection between Mrs. Allen from
Northanger Abbey and Emily from Atonement. We see that Emily is inactive and
unreceptive - lying for hours in her bedroom and letting her eldest child care for her
youngest. Mrs. Allen is passive as well, complaining all the time that they do not know
anyone in Bath but making no attempts to meet people.
3.3 Differences
Catherine could have inspired the character of Briony, although her imagination was
wild, but it did not have awful results. McEwan took the idea and adjoined some
consequences. Beyond that, Northanger Abbey and Adonement are two very different
novels for many reasons.
The principal discrepancy between them is, I think, in the picture of society that we
receive. Once considered so authentic, Austen can no longer be
considered realistic as present readers can't relate to the situation of

55

Wells, Juliette, Shades of Austen in Ian McEwans Atonement,

http://www.questia.com/library/1G1-199801402/shades-of-austen-in-ian-mcewan-s-atonement

48

the Regency landed gentry. The world has emancipated a lot since
then. At least women can publish today under their own real names.
On the other hand, we may say that Jane Austen doesn't meet
postmodernist literary standards because we have all become more
complicated, more. Contrary to the subtle psychological genuine
descriptions and the realisticness of the novels of Ian McEwan, called
by literary critics a vivisectionist of the human psyche56, Northanger Abbey is
true only in the context of Austen's milieu-Georgian and Regency Britain. Atonement is
a very psychological novel, its themes are layered through the characters' and narrators'
experience, while Northanger Abbey is a very classic novel, controlled by a very
omniscient and talkative narrator who has absolutely no participation while she does have
an interest in Catherine's thoughts and feelings.
Northanger Abbey looks like a description of particular moral
dispositions rather than of plausible human people whom one can take
seriously in their own right. Austens central characters aren't complex
and they do not have the psychological completeness we find in
McEwans characters while, they still they capture something true
about human nature. Austen wants her reader to talk to her and buy her
explanations and characterizations of things.
In contrast, in Adonement you really have to drop yourself into the character's mindsets
and believe them as they go. The novel has a plot driven forward by the characters. It is
the characters-as-persons with whom the reader is actually concerned. We are provided
with direct access to internal events in the minds of the characters and can comprehend
the plot as unfolding naturally from these. In Austens novel the focus is on how her
characters react to events, not on their capacity to cause them, and the happy endings, like
the intermediate trials and tribulations, are always deus ex machina ("god from the
machine"), that is, a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly
56

Messud, Claire, The Beauty of the Conjuring The pernicious power of fine storytelling is a central theme
in Ian McEwan's new novel, http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2002/03/messud.htm

49

solved with the artificial and surprising interference of some new character, event, ability,
or object.
In Northanger Abbey the plot is author driven - according to what Austen wants to
say, not what her characters want to do. Things are continuously happening, the central
characters are always doing strange things offstage like jilting lovers or eloping (likewise
powerless, falling into terrible illnesses) which is not at all realistic in terms of
following from what we have been told of their motivations and dispositions.
Although McEwens novel was based on themes from Jane Austen's work (family
relationship, love, money, snobbery, confusion and misperception, the role of fiction on
the human psychic, guilt and responsibility, growing up and coming of age), the
shockingly real themes of rape, war, anger, guilt, injury, and death are very different from
anything one would find in an Austen novel. His storytelling means prowl and charge and
his paragraphs are mined with menace. As a master of the undetonated bomb he also has
power over slow-acting detail: the effervescent fact that slowly melts during his narrative
and disturbs everything in its wake, the secret that will not stay dead and must act as a
vampire at midnight. Everything has a tragic context, unlike in Jane Austen where the
heroine needs to surpass naivete though certain initiation and social rituals, so as to
become enlightened.
Thus, we see another difference between the two novels. No matter the hardships along
the process, in Northanger Abbey, order is restored at the end, since
Henry is able to make amends, proposing marriage to Catherine. It is
therefore, interesting to note here that the verb to atone is recurrent
in Jane Austens fiction, indicating a possibility of repair and reordering.
In McEwans Atonement, we see that what the title promises can only
get materialized on a metafictional level. Old Briony considers in the
end that writing is a therapeutic, restorative or cathartic experience.

50

But a trial scene has never been considered by the writer because this
would have transformed the whole book into a procedural novel.57
Atonement is different from Jane Austens novel also because in fact it represents a new
era in McEwan's work itself: this revolution is achieved in two interesting ways ()
McEwan has loosened the golden ropes that have made his fiction feel so impressively
imprisoned. His new book is larger and more ample than anything he has done before,
and moves from an English country house in 1935 to an extraordinary description of the
British army's retreat at Dunkirk and a chapter set in wartime London.58
The narrator's perspective in Atonement is an important issue. Changing who the assumed
narrator is alters many characteristics of the book. It would be interesting if in
Northanger Abbey we had realized that the book was written either by Catherine's friend
or by her future daughter.
3.4 The Role of Fiction - a Motif Behind Action
Fiction plays a key role in the novel and it is a strong motif behind many actions. The
question in Atonement and in Northanger Abbey is: can the imagined and the real ever be
in harmony? In both novels all the powerful and dangerous work of the imagination fantasy, contemplation, elusions, self-dramatisation - come to blows to the real facts harsh things as they are.
According to many literary critics, Northanger Abbey is an early example of
meta-fiction, or fiction about fiction - more especially a kind of fiction that openly
comments on its own fictional status, because the reading and writing of fiction are
among its central concerns59. The characters have conversations about reading, the worth
of a novel, fiction versus nonfiction or history, women writers, and more. The
authoress incorporates a dispute of the form, role, and importance of
57

McEwans Intreview , http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-131389/Ian-McEwan-Q-A.html

Wood, James, The Trick of Truth, http://www.powells.com/review/2002_03_21.html
59
Coote, Stephen, The Penguin Short History of English Literature, Penguin Books, London, 1993, p.374
58

51

the novel into the book as well as references, insinuations and parodies
of her contemporary literary world. Through Catherine Austen gives an
interesting definition of the genre 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 humour, are conveyed to the
world in the best-chosen language.60
We see that Austen is against the trivialization of novel in the context of her time when it
was generally considered a simple form of entertainment. In Northanger Abbey she
makes it clear that it has, as a serious work of art, an inherent worth and poise. This is
why she portrays the heroine of this novel, as an avid reader who places a high premium
on the fictional worlds she comes upon.
By creating Catherine Morland a young lady from the minor gentry who feels herself to
be obsessed with the Gothic horrors of Mrs Radcliffe and her school, Jane Austen
broaches one of her central themes: the perils of letting imagination and feeling have
sway over reason and discretion.61 The novel shows a contrast between imagination and
the real world with its natural elations and cruelties. The tone of Northanger Abbey is
comedic, satirical, and ridiculous once in a while...the narrative becoming a social
commentary a kind of time capsule.
In the case of Adonement, we should see it as a way to discover how fiction is created and
how it acts out. We see that the pernicious power of fine storytelling is one of the book's
central themes.62 Briony, a meticulous 13 year old, for whom literature is also more than
just an object of consume or a source of cultural income. We see the scene where her
mother is confronted with The Trials of Arabella, from which we find out that the little
Briony is a perfectionist as she studied her mothers face for every trace of shifting
emotion.
60

Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, Chapter 5, www.pemberley.com/etext/NA/chapter5.htm,

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/121

61

Coote, Stephen, The Penguin Short History of English Literature, Penguin Books, London, 1993, p. 374

62

Messud, Claire, The Beauty of the Conjuring The pernicious power of fine storytelling is a central theme
in Ian McEwan's new novel

52

Also, we learn that Briony is used to being indulged with her every wish a bound to be
reality, and Emily Tallis obliged with looks of alarm. But if we look behind these
palpable features of character, The Trials of Arabella is in fact, a reflection on the
dangerous excesses of the theatre, tells the didactic story of a young girl who turns her
back on family for love, which is so unfathomable for the tender age of the author.
Despite the plot, the play is meant to educate her brother Leon and teach him a lesson:
how to deal with his ever changing girlfriends by getting married.
McEwan is funny about Briony's pretentious habit of stealing complicated words from
the dictionary, so that her verse melodrama, The Trials of Arabella, opens thus:
This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella
Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow.
It grieved her parents to see their first born
Evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne
Without permission...
Brionys play, The Trials of Arabella, written for the house party, but for various reasons
not then performed, is the fantasy of a very young writer enchanted by the idea that she
could in a few pages create a world complete with terrors and climaxes, and a necessary
sort of knowingness. The entire novel is a grown-up version of this achievement, a
conflict or coalescence of truth and fantasy, a novelists treatment of what is fantasised as
fact. Briony is the novelist, living, as her mother is said to have perceived (or the author,
or Briony, says she had perceived), in an intact inner world of which the writing was no
more than the visible surface. We merely have to trust somebody to be telling something
like the truth.63 We suppose there is redemption and atonement in the end, but we kind of
have the rug pulled out from under our feet, don't we?
We follow Briony's furies and daydreams, as her plans for the staging of her play are
slowly thwarted. She grows in awareness. Growing up, her love for fiction did not die
along with her self esteem but rather grew like her. For this reason she tries several drafts,
63

Kermode, Frank, Point of View, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/frank-kermode/point-of-view

53

which are not so well received, during her nurse trainee years. But this is not a motive for
her to stop, it rather challenges her and finally realises that it was the ultimate form of her
atonement, attempt to atonement actually. She ventures into using fiction, once her lethal
weapon to correct the errors she commited. This is to say that we ought to consider
Atonement as a way to find out how fiction is created and how does it act out.
Like Austen herself, McEwan comments in Atonement on precisely the kind of fiction
that he himself has tended to produce in the past. It may be going too far to see
Atonement as a kind of atonement for fiction's untruths, not least because Atonement is
ultimately, I think, a defense of fiction's untruths. But it is certainly a novel explicitly
troubled by fiction's fictionality, its artificiality, and eager to explore the question of the
novel's responsibility to truth.64
Actually, it is only through fiction itself that we can see how mistaken Briony is.
McEwan's perspective enables us to live in that "lofty, god-like place from which all
people could be judged alike." We discover how terribly Briony misjudged the moment in
front of the fountain. Atonement is both a criticism of fiction and a defense of fiction.
We know that there has always been unreality in Briony's life, therefore it is natural for
her to blend reality with fiction to create the most important story of her life. A literary
critic writes, "McEwan debates fiction and fact in this historical panorama covering six
decades of the twentieth century. Beginning in prewar Britain and concluding with the
millennium, Atonement is a study of before and after, cause and effect, crime and
punishment"65
It is a criticism of its shaping and exclusive torque, and a defense of its ideal democratic
generosity to all. A criticism of fiction's misuse; and a defense of an ideal. And this
doubleness, of apologia and celebration, could not be otherwise, for art is always its own
ombudsman, and thus healthier than its own sickness. Art is the foundation of its own
anti-foundationalism, and the anti-foundation of its own foundationalism. And from this
64
65

Wood, James, The Trick of Truth, http://www.powells.com/review/2002_03_21.html

Stovel, p.114

54

comes a further paradox: McEwan's perspectivism, whereby we see all the characters
equally, cannot avoid having a shaping torque of its own. There is no such thing, really,
as a confused or truly messy fiction; distortion is built into the form like radon
underneath sick buildings. The greatest, freest, truest, most lifelike fiction is nothing like
life (though some is closer to it than others). McEwan certainly knows this.66
By making Briony a novelist who, like Austen herself, who took up writing seriously at a
young age, McEwan has gone further than Austen. What McEwan shows us of Briony's
youthful writing - a rhyming, melodramatic playlet entitled The Trials of Arabella- is
not especially suggestive of Austen's own juvenilia. Yet McEwan's characterization of
Briony as being precociously concerned with language and the trappings of
professionalism is certainly reminiscent of Austen.67
We identify a certain hope in both novels, for the humanities and literature to act in
defining human nature. By reading them we can start to discover the relation between
what life truly is and what it appears to us. This is indeed, what Aristotle implies when he
teaches us that impossibility is preferable in literature to an unpersuasive possibility.
Nevertheless, this is great freedom. In Northanger Abbey as well as in Atonement, we are
shown how dangerous fiction can be, and why its transfer with lies has been seditious and
menacing. Austen and McEwan would like that their readers reflect on this subject.
Catherine and Briony are unable to shed their old melodramatic impulses, even as they
strive to get beyond them. Especially Briony shows the excitement of shaping a story that
fits, that makes too much sense.
Drawing reality from literature is a desire we all have. As all human beings we sometimes
want to live in the fantasy worlds created for us in literature and film. Like Briony and
Catherine we may become so obsessed with the fantasy worlds we write or read about
that we fail to see the real world. As a substitute, we may build our own fantasy worlds
within reality and in consequence make nasty assumptions about many people around us
66

idem
Wells, Juliette, Shades of Austen in Ian McEwans Atonement,
http://www.questia.com/library/1G1-199801402/shades-of-austen-in-ian-mcewan-s-atonement
67

55

and the situations we have to go through. Fortunately, Catherine's naivete doesn't cause
any serious problems, but Briony's illusions and lies have serious and fatal outcomes.
Like Austen, McEwan surely wants us to reflect on the dangerous complicities of fiction,
not just of melodrama but of form itself, which insists on sealing and plotting. What
Briony saw was in truth plotless, because it could not be made to mean. Yet a plot is
exactly what she imposes. Fiction, even very good fiction, often tends to notarize the
incomprehensible simply because it insists on its readability. 68
Nevertheless, McEwan goes further and investigates the role of the novelist as much as
the individual agent, in a world where there appears to be no higher power. Without God,
when one's own understanding and morality are the only criteria, how can the human
being find atonement? From whom can history, or God, the supervising author of the
universe, find atonement for the horror of the war? And how can the novelist, as Briony
becomes, find atonement in an imaginary world of her own conception?
Atonement asks what the English novel of the twenty-first century has become heir to,
and what it can do from now on. It seems that one of the things it can do is to be
genderless: we have here a novel written by a man acting the part of a woman writing a
male subject. Maybe Briony is a foolish, egocentric young girl, but as a late teenager and
later as an adult, she pays her dues. However, her crime still stands, and nothing is going
to wipe it away. Even the novel she has written about it can not free or atone her because
she has been playing God, setting the terms and rules. Yet, we all know that no one can
ever judge, absolve or condemn God.
So, a biased analysis edges in: if fiction is a way of ordering the universe in which the
writer is away in her or his thoughts, then is it a form of escapism, lacking any moral
force? In the Jewish and Christian religions, atonement is defined as making ones peace
with God for the misbehavior one has had. But what is atonement when leaving religion
out of the equation? Is it not to admit clearly to the person inside, who knows right from
wrong, that a wrong was done? In the book Atonement, this does not mean that the wrong
68

Wood, James, The Trick of Truth, http://www.powells.com/review/2002_03_21.html

56

can be righted. Actually this is impossible, in most cases, since there are always
consequences of every word and deed. It rather means that one can look in the mirror and
honestly face his or her actions. Does Briony do this? Is her narrative just another form of
false witness, and accordingly inexcusable? And are some forms of fiction more
unjustifiable than others?
But I wasn't sure how much the life of establishment England (with its diplomats
planning mass bombings, its rapacious businessmen, its repression of women, its
maintaining of feudal class systems) was being held responsible for the carnage visited
on the poor bloody infantry at Dunkirk. Robbie suggests it: 'A dead civilisation. First his
own life ruined, then everybody else's.' 69

CONCLUSIONS
Jane Austens Northanger Abbey and Ian McEwans, Atonement, are books which push us
back towards life with new ways of thinking and understanding it. We may learn from
these novels that we should not confuse, like Catherine Morland or Briony Tiler
imagination and reality, unless we must pass through a process of growing up, of
maturation, of understanding our own limits.
Having a certain documentary dimension, both novels capture the essence of what it
means to be human and alive. That is why they are significant and influential. They are
books about universal things which mattered in the past and still matter today love,
money, family. They convince by exploring the relationship between the individual and
their environment, their culture, their history and by engaging in an ethical mediation. We
may conclude, therefore, that this kind of fiction sits at an uncomfortable and morally
problematic approach to history, while trying not to make a claim to completeness
whilst at the same time, through its emotive force and interactivity its best selling and
marketable.
69

Lee, Hermione, If Your Memories Serve You Well, The Observer, Sunday 23 September 2001,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/23/fiction.bookerprize2001

57

We might as well agree to Daniel Zalewski who asserts that at a moment when the
hardback novel seems endangered, McEwans work is almost scandalously popular.
Such is the case of Jane Austen, too, who is still accepted as true, smart and fresh. Many
critics agree that although these writers primarily investigate ideas, their international
success has a lot to do with an old-fashioned talent for creating suspense70 and holding
back information. They are still fashionable because of their attention-grabbing plots and
the terrific narrative tension of their writings which are to provoke gargantuan appetite in
all kinds of readers. Reading such books, we often find it impossible to slow down, so
powerful is the pull of "What next?"
Both Jane Austen and Ian McEwan have demonstrated that a true novel is much more
than the quintessence of a great read. It is a delight and a solace, a challenge and a
reward, and perhaps even an obsession - an obsession with reality versus imagination.
Like Catherine, Briony had not yet been well integrated into society and was certainly too
immature to understand the conduct of adults. Although she was also juvenile, Briony
formed within her mind solid, reflective ideas which she took, after long-lasting
ruminations, to be entirely true, such as her thoughts about being alive.
In conclusion, both these novels deal with reality in fictional terms which helps make
the stories more alive and actual to the reader. Peter Carey, who has twice won the
Booker Prize, Britains best-known literary award, explained that the work of the novelist
is a mixing of what we see with what we think, with that which can never be.71
It seems now that both Northanger Abbey and Atonement are such products of a beguiling
concoction of all these three ingredients that Peter Carey declares one needs in order to
become a novelist. These two books deal with the extent to which one can ever correct an
error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. They are about the growth of
70

Wells, Juliette, Shades of Austen in Ian McEwan's Atonement, http://www.questia.com/library/1G1-

199801402/shades-of-austen-in-ian-mcewan-s-atonement
71

58

a moral conscience and by reading them we become more aware that all of us have done
something we regret and lament; that we should find a way of removing that from our
conscience, or at least to find out whether that is even possible.

Both novels address issues of difference and otherness in their narrative construction,
especially through a self conscious story telling while meta-fiction and a more complex
use of point-of-view enable them to succeed in presenting a family saga and a
bildungsroman as a literary genre. McEwans use of focalization, a term used in modern
narratology for point of view, complicates the authorial partiality of Jane Austens
novel, when the omniscient narrator of the older Briony-as-author, compromised by her
need for atonement, can no longer be seen as non-focalized.

I believe that few other novelists can claim as many fans or as much devotion to their
ability to create the sensation that we are visiting real places and joining in the lives of
real people. Jane Austen and Ian McEwan will remain popular and admired, more than
other classic authors, read and reread by generations of enthusiasts because there is
something timelessly brilliant about their novels, obviously entangled
with their literary character but quite different from their literary merit.
They have the power to transform imagination and reality and to reposition our existence
in new ways of thinking and understanding. In my opinion, Austen and McEwan will be
certainly proved as writers of great talent, even after many generations have passed from
now, since their abilities in writing are enabled by a penetrating intelligence and their
prose style is so rich and flexible.

59

BIBLIOGRAPHY LIST
Primary Sources:
Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994
Austen, Jane, Sense and Sensibility, Wordsworth Editions Ltd, Hertfordshire, 1993
Austen, Jane, Mandrie si prejudecata, (trad. Anca Florea, pref Dan Grigorescu), ed. Leda,
Bucuresti, 2007
Bradbury, Malcom, The Modern British Novel: 1878-2001, Harmondsworth, Penguin,
2001
Brownstein, Rachel M., Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice,
The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997
Burrows, John. Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels, and an
Experiment in Method, Oxford University Press, 1987

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Carter, Ronald, McRae John, The Penguine Guide to Literature in English, Pearson
Eduvation Ltd. & Penguine Books Ltd, Harlow, 2004
Coote, Stephen, The Penguin Short History of English Literature, Penguin Books,
London, 1993
Fowler, Alastair, A History of English Literature, Cambridge, Mass, 1991
Giffin, Michael, Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England,
New York, Palgrave, Macmillan, 2002
Grey, J. David, ed., A. Walton Litz and Brian Southam, consulting editors. The Jane
Austen Companion (with A Dictionary of Jane Austen's Life and Works by H. Abigail
Bok), Macmillan, 1986
McEwan, Ian, Atonement, New York: Anchor Books, 2003
Nussbaum, Martha Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal
Education Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997

Secondary Sources:
Lynch, Deidre, "Cult of Jane Austen", Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005
Ryan, Kiernan. Ian McEwan. (Writers and Their Work). Plymouth: Northcote
House/British Council, 1994
Updike, John, Flesh on Flesh, New Yorker, 13 May 2002, 80

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Vianu, Lidia. The AfterMode: Present Day English Fiction. Bucharest: Contemporary
Literature Press / U of Bucharest / British Council / Romanian Cultural Institute, 2012
Waugh, Patricia, Metafiction: the theoryand practice of self-conscious fiction, London
and New York: Routledge, 1984
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http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2002/03/messud.htm
http://www.powells.com/review/2002_03_21.html
http://www.abrapui.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Artigo-ABRAPUI-34-Genilda.pdf
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-131389/Ian-McEwan-Q-A.html

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http://www.academia.edu/192075/The_Impression_of_a_Deeper_Darkness_Ian_McEwa
ns_Atonement

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