Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/193

 Anne Elliot what words of praise are high enough? But Catherine Morland is an obvious copy of Evelina: a good-hearted, simple-minded little goose, who will never develop into much. She is distinctly inferior to Eleanor Tilney, and it is impossible not to have a lurking suspicion that Henry, after trying—as he would do for some years—to form his wife's mind, will discover, like David Copperfield, that it is already formed, and that his life at Woodston Parsonage may some day be just a little dull. Probably Jane Austen felt this herself, for she closes the story with a playful account of their marriage, and makes no attempt to picture their future life together. It is the only one of her stories in which the heroine is decidedly inferior to the hero, and that was so often the case with the standard novels of her day that it is impossible not to see in this the unconscious plagiarism of a young author, and to feel that Northunger Abbey, in plan and construction if not in all its details, must have been one of her earliest attempts at novel writing.