Irony (3)

A friend's father used to say to her, "Don't teach your father to suck eggs." He used the expression whenever he thought she was being condescending.

The thing is, I think it is very important to teach ourselves how to suck eggs. We have to go back and look at things that might seem too basic and obvious to analyze and analyze them. For example, we should be careful to note that the opening sentence of Northanger Abbey reads like this:

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.

And not like this:

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland would suppose her to be an heroine.

Here are the egg-sucking points I think follow from that:

• Even if we take this as being ironic it does not follow that Catherine is an heroine, only that she was born to be one.
• Her infancy—that is where she was born and how she was brought up—is the thing that Austen thinks really matters.
• It would follow that every girl with an infancy similar to Catherine's is born to be an heroine.

Further complicating the whole thing is whether Austen is being realistically ironic or "novelistically" ironic; that is, does she mean simply that Catherine Morland has the makings of an heroine even though she doesn't seem the part or does she mean she doesn't seem like a likely heroine for a novel and I'm only sticking her in one to make a burlesque of it?