In line to dance

In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the young, not-terribly-interesting Catherine is less character than lens, framing three distinct social spaces: her English village with many siblings; Bath with its gentry involved in plays and excursions; and finally, Northanger Abbey, seat of gardens and old wealth. It is Bath—the entrepreneurial in-between—that permits unexpected encounters between high and low, the deceptive and the deceived, as well as the staged connivances to move up. Romantically, we root for social ascent that comes out of love or chance and not from calculated elevation. Austen obliges us by dooming those trials to fail.