Northanger Abbey: AuthenticityIn what is for Jane Austen an unusually direct intervention, the narrator of Northanger Abbey remarks near the end: "The anxiety, which in the state of their attachment must be the part of Henry and Catherine, and of all who have loved either, as to its final event, can hardly be extended, I fear, within of my readers, who will see in the revealing compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together toward perfect bliss. She might as well have said "It's a romantic comedy I'm writing" rather than announcing that the happy conclusion was a foregone conclusion. In terms of reception by the public - surprise, suspense, narrative carryover - the advantage of writing film scripts (unlike television, where the public can know when the end is near simply by looking at their collective watch ) is that there is no scenario. revealing page compression”; your viewers don't know when the end is coming. If you write storylines for, say, Blue Heelers, you make them last forty-eight minutes without making fun of it, and the impending end of the story is obvious to everyone. The great thing about being a novelist is that you can decide where you want to stop. One of the biggest differences between Austen's novels and their current film versions - two of which were written for television - is that Emma Thompson's screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, Nick Dear's for Persuasion, and that of 'Andrew Davies's Pride and Prejudice -- unlike all the originals -- was circumscribed first and last by material constraintsFor the si...... middle of paper ......als, journalists and fans in period costumes (mostly some forty years later, the omnipresent crinoline serving as the general symbol of historical disguise) arrived at the gates of the MCG in variously anachronistic horse-drawn vehicles and vintage cars with Coca-Cola logos on it. But how deep and broad is the nostalgia for authenticity in the late 20th century, and how problematic and paradoxical a notion it has become in its tendency to make us forget history rather than remember it, was demonstrated in Tasmania on the afternoon of Sunday April 28. , when many Port Arthur tourists mistook today's reality for a harmless facsimile of a deadly past - "one of those re-enactment things" - and began rushing towards the gunfire, instead of 'get away from it. Works Cited: Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Ed. Claire Grogan. New York: Broadview, 2002.