Friendship in Northanger Abbey

Austen's works, including Northanger Abbey, reflect the genteel if non 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 apart(predicate) from her family, in which she was the seventh of eight children. The Austens moved from Steventon in 1801, surviving thereafter in Bath, Southampton, Chawton, and Winchester. Austen began as a child to lay aside novels for her family, and these all reflected the life of a country family in which bullion 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 luff impact on a young woman's ability to follow well (or even marry at all), and while Austen whitethorn satirize the morals of her time, she does seem to believe rather hard in the idea that a woman should marry if at all possible (Ash and Higton, 1995, p. 14).

However, m matchlessy does not have almost as much to do with fellowship 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 occurrence that the world in which Austen lived was in some ship canal segregated by sex, ensuring that people would draw most of their friends from their let sex. Finally, it seems clear that Austen's emphasis on the importance of female friends (including sisters and new(prenominal) female relatives as friends) probably

unless her works were no doubt also commonplace because they resonated with the popular imagination of the time. The importance of friendship in improving the lives of individuals alone of not disrupting the overall social order is an important cheek of the author's popularity. We see throughout Austen's work a certain democratic tendency in the nature of friendship, for women are far much 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 frugalally different from themselves. Friendship may then 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, notwithstanding not entirely outside their class. individual like Harriet Smith is as far as an Austen heroine ordain ever go in friendship. Women below them can adjoin 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 vaunt 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 successor mother or perhaps an aunt, Eleanor Tilney is at first a surrogate sister and then one in integrity - Austen seems to suggest that women's friendships, even when independently arrived at, are in fact supported by a web of familial and and so male-based family links (Johnson, 1995, p. 126).

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