From Netley Abbey to "Northanger Abbey": Literary Tourism and the Cultural Legacy of the Dissolution of the Monasteries

This article investigates Netley Abbey, a surviving ruined monastery located near Southampton (UK), as a paradigmatic site where the cultural aftermath of the sixteenth‑century Dissolution of the monasteries intersected with eighteenth‑ and nineteenth‑century literary tourism. Central to the study is Jane Austen’s documented interest in the site and her novel Northanger Abbey (1818), which engages with England’s monastic legacy by re‑imagining monastic space as domesticated and stripped of its original religious significance. By juxtaposing Netley’s actual trajectory—from Cistercian foundation through domestic reuse to ruin—with the fictional evolution of Northanger Abbey, which is transformed into a genteel country house, the analysis shows how Austen rewrites monastic space, converting the aesthetic erasure of the ruin into a backdrop for genteel domesticity. The paper argues that the convergence of literary tourism, Romantic aesthetic theory, and Austen’s fiction demonstrates literature’s active role in constructing and re‑inscribing both tangible and imagined sites as heritage locations, mediating the transformation of dissolved monastic remains into symbols of cultural and literary heritage.