Love at Christmas

Christmas barely registers in Jane Austen’s novels: Only three of them—Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion—include true Christmas-time scenes.

Still, the holiday comes in for occasional mentions in the other three novels as well, and nowhere more amusingly than in Northanger Abbey, when the insincere and self-absorbed Isabella Thorpe, newly engaged to Catherine Morland’s brother James, recalls the delights of the previous year’s noel:

“You are so like your dear brother,” continued Isabella, “that I quite doted on you the first moment I saw you. But so it always is with me; the first moment settles everything. The very first day that Morland came to us last Christmas—the very first moment I beheld him—my heart was irrecoverably gone. I remember I wore my yellow gown, with my hair done up in braids; and when I came into the drawing–room, and John introduced him, I thought I never saw anybody so handsome before.”

Here Catherine secretly acknowledged the power of love; for, though exceedingly fond of her brother, and partial to all his endowments, she had never in her life thought him handsome.

--Northanger Abbey, chapter 15

Here’s wishing a merry Christmas to all who celebrate the occasion! May your gown, your braids, and your company prove as satisfying as Isabella Thorpe’s.