Jane Austen’s friendships defied social class – and empowered her writing

We would like to thank Anna Walker|Jane Wright for the contribution to this article.

Jane Austen’s Paper Trail is a podcast from The Conversation celebrating 250 years since the author’s birth. In each episode, we’ll be investigating a different aspect of Austen’s personality by interrogating one of her novels with leading researchers. Along the way, we’ll visit locations important to Austen to uncover a particular aspect of her life and the times she lived in. In episode 4, we look at who were Austen’s friends, and ask what we can learn about friendship in the pages of her fourth novel, Emma.

When she created the “handsome, clever and rich” Emma Woodhouse, Jane Austen wrote that she suspected this was a character “no one but myself will much like”. It’s difficult to disagree with her