Importance of Friendship in Northanger Abbey

Austen's works, including Northanger Abbey, reflect the genteel if not wealthy world in which she was raised. Born near Basingstoke, in the parish of Steventon, of which her father was rector, she was educated at home and never lived unconnected from her family, in which she was the seventh of eight children. The Austens moved from Steventon in 1801, sustainment thereafter in Bath, Southampton, Chawton, and Winchester. Austen began as a child to carry through novels for her family, and these all reflected the life of a country family in which cash was never quite plentiful enough. This lack of substantial wealthiness is an explicit element of Austen's novels, for a family's wealth had a verbatim impact on a young woman's ability to bond well (or even marry at all), and while Austen may satirize the morals of her time, she does seem to believe rather firmly in the idea that a woman should marry if at all possible (Ash and Higton, 1995, p. 14).

However, m iodiney does not have almost as much to do with friendship as it does with marriage, and this is one of the reasons that the theme of friendship between and among women is of such importance in Austen's novels - added to the particular that the world in which Austen lived was in many a(prenominal) shipway segregated by sex, ensuring that people would draw most of their friends from their deliver sex. Finally, it seems clear that Austen's emphasis on the importance of female friends (including sisters and some other female relatives as friends) probably

however her works were no doubt also popular because they resonated with the popular imagination of the time. The importance of friendship in improving the lives of individuals more(prenominal)over of not disrupting the overall social order is an important reflexion of the author's popularity. We see throughout Austen's work a certain parliamentary tendency in the nature of friendship, for women atomic number 18 far more likely to have friends (often many of them) who have more or less money than themselves than they are likely to have suitors who are so sparingally different from themselves. Friendship may hence go where lines of inheritance cannot. And yet even it cannot go genuinely far.

The women of Jane Austen take friends who are outside the fine level of economic distinction that they inhabit, further not entirely outside their class. psyche like Harriet Smith is as far as an Austen heroine leave behind ever go in friendship. Women below them can tempt charity (and honest and sincere charity) but never friendship (Johnson, 1995, p. 78).

Ash, R. & B. Higton (eds.) (1995). Jane Austen. London: Aurum Press Ltd.

Johnson, C. (1995). Equivocal beings: Politics, gender and sentimentality. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Austen may have sensed that this was a potentially radical notion, that women could curl in the company of other women not as a poor substitute for the company of their husbands and not as something to do simply until a man happened to come along and propose, but as an end in itself. By cloaking so many of the friendships in her novels as examples of fictive kinship - Mrs. Allen is a replacement mother or perhaps an aunt, Eleanor Tilney is at first a surrogate sister and then one in police force - Austen seems to suggest that women's friendships, even when independently arrived at, are in fact supported by a web of familial and wherefore male-based family links (Johnson, 1995, p. 126).

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