“Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.”
This is the narrator’s voice, in the chapter where Henry, Eleanor and Catherine hike to the top of Beechen Cliff, and Catherine feels completely ignorant about Henry’s ideas of what makes a beautiful landscape
Northanger Abbey, volume 1, chapter 14
The Jane Austen Guide to Life: Thoughtful Lessons for the Modern Woman (May, 2012)