Northanger Abbey
By: Jane Austen / Narrated By: Rachel Atkins
Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
PERFECT Narration, came to really love Catherine!
After choosing Northanger Abbey as one o’ my Listens this week, my sister shot back with a shocked, “You have SIX versions of this?!? Why this one as the narrator?!”
It’s cuz o’ this, see. Once upon a time, you were able to pick up the kindle version cheeeeap, and that would open up a vast universe of options for (cheeeeeap!) audiobook narrator performances (I’m serious! Like, .99-1.99! Maybe 2.99 if it was an actor of fame and fortune!!!). So good golly gosh, I got ‘em all!!! Or MOST of them.
But then ‘twas a modern-day “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” with, in this case, one narrator sounding tooooo old to be our yooooung heroine, Catherine Morland; one sounding tooooo ditzy; one absoLUTELY becoming THE voice for a different heroine in a different novel. Stuff like that; I’m twitchy that way.
As I’ve read each Jane Austen in print MULtiple times, so have I listened to the audiobooks, different narrators, sooo many different times. Each narrator highlighted something unique, but oh friend: How you’ll love this performance by narrator Rachel Atkins!!!
Now, thus far I’ve ALWAYS heard the story as presented in the Publisher’s Summary for Northanger Abbey where 17-year old Catherine Morland is sooo fond of Gothic novels that when she finds herself invited to the Abbey, she starts looking at EVERYthing through the lens of: There’s a skeleton behind that veil! Oh NOOOOO!!! Each nook, each cranny, each old chest, each locked wardrobe: GASP! And when she finds out that the mother of her host died, with p’raps only the father around? And Papa is kinda a nutbag? Why, p’RAPs heeee had something to do with the untimely death!
And s’posedly Gothic Loving Catherine finds herself in a Gothic novel, and that’s that…
Noooo, not here, not with the amazing performance of Rachel Atkins. Cuz there’s sooo much more to the story that I ever got from any other narration, or even that I ever wrung out of my (Apparently!) limited imagination upon reading the venerable Ms. Austen’s text.
Rather, here it’s about Catherine starting the story as a middling gadabout, eager for adventure, and journeying as a companion to Bath. She’s sooo bored at first that she’s INSTANTLY taken with The. First. Guy who asks her to dance and chats amiably with her. -THEN- she meets a young woman by the name of Isabella and the two become daaaarling friends. Isabella LOVES her deeeear Catherine. She shares her EVERY thought with her, her deepest desires, her most sacred confidences. Oh, and she has an obNOXious brother who will NOT leave Catherine alone.
That Catherine would MUCH rather be with Henry Tilney (The young man at the Rooms in Bath) and his sister Eleanor? Oh, NOT a consideration as she must do what Isabella and her brother (And even Catherine’s own brother, James) dictate she must do with them.
THIS is where Atkins is exCEPtional: She starts Catherine off, a trifle twittery but then we hear Catherine as she grows to become a young woman who begins to know her own mind, who starts speaking for herself, who starts standing up for herself, and who ultimately begins championing her beliefs about what is right and what is most CERtainly wrong.
Yeh Yeh Yeh, there’s the whole Wild Outta Control Gothic thinking, but that’s just an itty bitty bit of the entirety of this novel; and it serves to teach her lessons that completely change her and serve to guide her on how to properly train her mind. Now this is something that Catherine so totally needs as we’ve seen her, from the beginning, as a rather sloppy-minded and careless girl.
So Huzzah Huzzah Huzzah! Prior to this Listen? I’d always considered Northanger Abbey to be Austen’s weakest piece, which is kinda damning when one considers what an uptight git Fanny from Mansfield Park is. Noooo, it turns out? Gimme a goose who blossoms into a delightful young woman any day of the week. I’m ALL for Growth. And?
Dude, there’s a Happily Ever After! What more is there to want?!
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