Henry Tilney

Henry Tilney is the leading man in Jane Austen's 1817 novel Northanger Abbey. The younger son of a local landowner, Tilney is comfortably placed as a beneficed clergyman on his father's estate.

Tilney, with his teasing yet kind-hearted mentorship of Catherine, has been considered the nicest of Austen's heroes.^[1] At the same time, with his knowledge of muslin and of Gothic novels, he is the least masculine of them.^[2] Overshadowed by his military father and elder brother, he is a strangely passive figure, falling for Catherine only after she falls for him,^[3] and with his father as the driving force behind her coming to the Abbey.^[4] Nevertheless, he does not lack moral courage, as he shows with his marriage to Catherine at the book's close.^[5]

Frank Swinnerton considered that, as a teasing mentor, knowledgeable on female matters, Tilney might represent a disguised version of the author herself.^[6] Later critics, more cautiously, have seen him as representing in part the author's "voice".^[7]

Sydney Smith, who is known to have overlapped with Austen in Bath at the close of the eighteenth century, and whose witty conversation resembles Tilney's, has also been seen as a possible model for the character.^[8] So too has Austen's witty brother Henry: “affectionate & kind as well as entertaining....he cannot help being amusing”.^[9]