Northanger Abbey and The Importance of Being Earnest: A Possible Echo

In an early chapter of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (published posthumously in 1817), Isabella Thorpe, pretending indignation at being observed by two young men in the pump rooms in Bath, says to her companion Catherine Morland, ‘Let us go and look at the arrivals. They will hardly follow us there.’1 Amidst the hilarious unfolding of the plot in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), when it is revealed that, although no longer engaged to the same man, neither Gwendolen nor Cecily are engaged to a man called Ernest, Gwendolen suggests to Cecily, ‘Let us go into the garden. They will hardly venture to come after us there.’2 The indignation, the affectation of retreat, and the linking word ‘hardly’, with its comic evocation of moral disapproval, suggests a firm link between the two works, and seems to locate a direct source for a key moment in Wilde’s play, and an indebtedness to an author he, perhaps rather uneasily, admired. References to Jane Austen are rare but tantalizing in his work. She was one of the authors whose works he thought of presenting to the library of Reading Gaol on his release, in order to enliven the lives of ‘the poor imprisoned fellows I live with’.3 But other references are ambiguous or double-edged: according to Michael Field, Jane Austen was included in his conception of genius as a partly ruinous force;4 while his reference to her in a letter to Robert Ross seems to undermine her art even as it praises: reproving Ross for writing a letter of business merely, and reminding him that he has often written in a different manner, he goes on to say,