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.
Character Tilney, with his teasing yet kind-hearted mentorship of Catherine, has been considered the nicest of Austen's heroes.G. B. Stern, Talking of Jane Austen (London 1946) p.73 At the same time, with his knowledge of muslin and of Gothic novels, he is the least "masculine" of them.Claire Harman, Jane's Fame (Edinburgh 2009) p. 249 Overshadowed by his military father and elder brother, he is a strangely passive figure, falling for Catherine only after she falls for him,R. Jenkyns, A Fine Brush on Ivory (Oxford 2007) p. 135-6 and with his father as the driving force behind her coming to the Abbey.E. Copeland, The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (Cambridge 1997) p. 38-9 Nevertheless, he does not lack moral courage, as he shows with his marriage to Catherine at the book's close.G. B. Stern, Talking of Jane Austen (London 1946) p.153
Origins Frank Swinnerton considered that, as a teasing mentor, knowledgeable on female matters, Tilney might represent a disguised version of the author herself.G. B. Stern, Talking of Jane Austen (London 1946) p.74 Later critics, more cautiously, have seen him as representing in part the author's "voice".B. Hardy, Reading of Jane Austen (2000) p. 166
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.B. Benedict ed. Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey (Cambridge 2006) Introduction p. xxv So too has Austen's witty brother Henry: “affectionate & kind as well as entertaining....he cannot help being amusing”.Deidre Le Faye ed., Jane Austen's Letters (Oxford 1996) p. 101-2 and Introduction p. x
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