What to make of the end (2)

The moment that strains our credulity to the breaking point in Northanger Abbey is the moment when Henry reproves Catherine for her suspicions about his father. Even given what we have guessed, and our guess is soon confirmed, about the nature of the relationship between the General and his children, this moment passes too easily. The relationship between Catherine and Henry should be heavily strained by this. At the very least, a grovelling apology is required from Catherine. Nothing like that happens.

Here is what I think actually happens. This conversation exists solely so that Austen can have Henry make her points for her. And here he makes them:

Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?

That is not, as I have argued before, a criticism of Radcliffe. Radcliffe's novels are deliberately set in in countries other than England to make exactly the point Austen is making here—that these things could not happen in England (although they could happen in the exotic south).

But, here is the thing, the whole point is that Catherine's sensibilities as developed by her reading of Radcliffe (and others) has no connection to her life in England. They don't connect in the book because they cannot connect. And that is the message we are to draw.