In Volume ii of Northanger Abbey Isabella Thorpe presses her brother's suit on Catherine Morland, but she gets a surprising reception. John Thorpe has informed her in a letter, Isabella asserts, that he has ‘as good as made you an offer’; and she can give circumstantial evidence that this is true. It happened, she adds, at their lodgings in Edgar's Buildings, on the morning immediately before Thorpe left Bath. Catherine is taken aback. She vehemently denies that any such conversation took place. ‘As to any attentions on his side, I do declare, upon my honour, I never was sensible of them for a moment’, she exclaims. Moreover, she declares, they were never together that morning. ‘The last half hour before he went away! — It must be all and completely a mistake’ (NA ii: 7, 147). Catherine has been established as the soul of innocent integrity, a young lady too who has ‘an unaffected openness to experience’, but if a reader turns back only three chapters, they will find that Catherine, for whatever reason, is here quite in the wrong.

There Jane Austen stages the farce of a man making a proposal so clumsily that the young woman hasn't the slightest idea of what he is about. The narrator, in the confidently ironic commentary that is Austen's mode in this novel, points up the comedy. Catherine hurries away, she writes, leaving Thorpe to ‘the undivided consciousness of his own happy address, and her explicit encouragement’ (i: 15, 127). Though Thorpe is generally so unreliable about facts as to be delusional, there is manifest textual evidence in this instance that he does make advances – sidelong, bumbling and roundabout as they are. What is surprising, though, is not that Catherine failed to catch his meaning, as that she has apparently totally forgotten the whole exchange took place. ‘I did not see him once that whole morning’, she asserts. Isabella instantly corrects her. ‘You spent the whole morning in Edgar's Buildings — it was the day your father's consent came . . . you and John were alone in the parlour, some time before you left the house.’ Catherine is perturbed: ‘For the life of me, I cannot recollect it. – I do remember now being with you, and seeing him as well as the rest – but that we were ever alone for five minutes —.’