Nearly anyone who has been to the movies in the past few years has probably seen a film adapted from one of the novels of Jane Austen, who is having one of those revivals of interest that is sometimes inflicted upon artists from pre-mass media eras. And the most enduring scene from each of these movies is the last one, in which everyone of any importance is happily married off.
And yet despite the nearly deafening clangor of marriage bells in AustenÆs works, and despite the amount of mental anguish that her characters devote to matchmaking and being matched, the theme of friendship is just as important as that of romantic love, although rarely acknowledged to be so. If AustenÆs pages are full of endless dialogue about the importance of love and marriage, it is important to note that all of this dialogue is going on between friends. After a brief summary of AustenÆs work, this paper looks at the importance of friendship in Northanger Abbey (1818) and how the theme of friendship relates both to the importance of marriage and to the characters relationship to the larger society.
Austen (1775-1817) has become known not simply as one of the major female English novelists û a position that she held for several decades last century û but simply one of the best English novelists because of her brilliantly witty, elegantly structured satirical fiction. In her work can be clearly seen a clear transition in English literature from 18th-century neoclassicism to 19th-century romanticism (Ash and Higton, 1995, p. 12).
AustenÆs 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 apart from her family, in which she was the seventh of eight children. The Austens moved from Steventon in 1801, living thereafter in Bath, Southampton, Chawton, and Winchester. Austen began...