2 quotations linked to Northanger Abbey by or associated with Jane Austen, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Friendship, disappointed love, novels, reading, taste, irony, imagination and Austen’s comic defense of fiction against social condescension.
Dates represented in this collection: 1817 · 1818. Individual quotation notes provide the most specific context for a passage.
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”
Friendship is framed as practical emotional support when romantic hopes fail, without pretending it instantly removes disappointment.
Northanger Abbey.
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
The playful exaggeration defends pleasure in fiction and pushes back against the idea that reading novels is an intellectually inferior pastime.
Northanger Abbey, in Henry Tilney’s conversation about reading novels.
