Trigger warnings for Austen have failed to notice the sex

No one who has ever read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey would have supposed the novel to be capable of triggering much other than amusement.

- ANNA CAMILLERI

Before any narrative action takes place, we are cautioned by the author that we may find the conceit dated and the heroine unlikely. Completed in 1803 but not published until after the author’s death, the book contains a warning to the reader that places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes” since it was written.

In the wake of the furore surrounding the decision by the University of Greenwich to issue its undergraduate students with a trigger warning for Northanger Abbey, it is impossible not to read Austen’s own cautioning words as prescient.

Undergraduates at the university have been alerted to the notion that the novel contains gender stereotyping” alongside toxic relationships and friendships”. While Austen would probably be delighted to learn that her books are the object of such strongly held opinions some two centuries after their publication, she would have been baffled by accusations of upholding gender stereotypes.